1,087 research outputs found
FlightGoggles: A Modular Framework for Photorealistic Camera, Exteroceptive Sensor, and Dynamics Simulation
FlightGoggles is a photorealistic sensor simulator for perception-driven
robotic vehicles. The key contributions of FlightGoggles are twofold. First,
FlightGoggles provides photorealistic exteroceptive sensor simulation using
graphics assets generated with photogrammetry. Second, it provides the ability
to combine (i) synthetic exteroceptive measurements generated in silico in real
time and (ii) vehicle dynamics and proprioceptive measurements generated in
motio by vehicle(s) in a motion-capture facility. FlightGoggles is capable of
simulating a virtual-reality environment around autonomous vehicle(s). While a
vehicle is in flight in the FlightGoggles virtual reality environment,
exteroceptive sensors are rendered synthetically in real time while all complex
extrinsic dynamics are generated organically through the natural interactions
of the vehicle. The FlightGoggles framework allows for researchers to
accelerate development by circumventing the need to estimate complex and
hard-to-model interactions such as aerodynamics, motor mechanics, battery
electrochemistry, and behavior of other agents. The ability to perform
vehicle-in-the-loop experiments with photorealistic exteroceptive sensor
simulation facilitates novel research directions involving, e.g., fast and
agile autonomous flight in obstacle-rich environments, safe human interaction,
and flexible sensor selection. FlightGoggles has been utilized as the main test
for selecting nine teams that will advance in the AlphaPilot autonomous drone
racing challenge. We survey approaches and results from the top AlphaPilot
teams, which may be of independent interest.Comment: Initial version appeared at IROS 2019. Supplementary material can be
found at https://flightgoggles.mit.edu. Revision includes description of new
FlightGoggles features, such as a photogrammetric model of the MIT Stata
Center, new rendering settings, and a Python AP
Past, Present, and Future of Simultaneous Localization And Mapping: Towards the Robust-Perception Age
Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM)consists in the concurrent
construction of a model of the environment (the map), and the estimation of the
state of the robot moving within it. The SLAM community has made astonishing
progress over the last 30 years, enabling large-scale real-world applications,
and witnessing a steady transition of this technology to industry. We survey
the current state of SLAM. We start by presenting what is now the de-facto
standard formulation for SLAM. We then review related work, covering a broad
set of topics including robustness and scalability in long-term mapping, metric
and semantic representations for mapping, theoretical performance guarantees,
active SLAM and exploration, and other new frontiers. This paper simultaneously
serves as a position paper and tutorial to those who are users of SLAM. By
looking at the published research with a critical eye, we delineate open
challenges and new research issues, that still deserve careful scientific
investigation. The paper also contains the authors' take on two questions that
often animate discussions during robotics conferences: Do robots need SLAM? and
Is SLAM solved
A FUSION-BASED WORKFLOW FOR TURNING SLAM POINT CLOUDS AND FISHEYE DATA INTO TEXTURE-ENHANCED 3D MODELS
Abstract. Mobile mapping systems are increasingly developing ad hoc solution and integrated approaches for rapid and accurate 3D digitization in different operating environments belonging to built heritage assets. The use of emerging compact, portable and low-cost solution for imaging and ranging well fits in the purposes of mapping complex indoor spaces especially for narrow and underground ones (tunnels, mines, caves and ancient spaces), that are very challenging contexts in which to experiment integrated technological solutions and tailored workflows. In these cases, the main key issues are generally the difficulty in the seamless positioning and the complete and successful metric-radiometric content association in metric surface, due to the reduced manoeuvring space and complex lighting conditions. The prevalent goals for which the 3D digitization could be conceived are, beyond the accurate metric documentation, the analysis of mutual relations of volumes in complex structures, the virtual reconstruction and navigation of spaces with reduced accessibility for dissemination aims. The new SLAM-based positioning solutions implemented in some recent portable systems for indoor/outdoor mapping are increasingly developing and favoured by geometric features extraction algorithms even in traveling through complex and irregular environments. In parallel, the possibility to exploit the advances in digital photogrammetry algorithms for image matching and dense reconstruction using action-cam, compact and fisheye cameras allows to deploy investigation solutions even in complex environments at first sight impossible to map by photogrammetric approach. Here within the F.I.N.E. benchmark in the site of the San Vigilio Castle (Bergamo) and the "nottole" tunnels, a fusion-based workflow is proposed. It is focused on the purposes of providing radiometrically enriched 3D data from the possibility to colourized ZEB point cloud and a textured mesh surfaces with an oriented image block, taking care of the time processing steps optimization
Markerless visual servoing on unknown objects for humanoid robot platforms
To precisely reach for an object with a humanoid robot, it is of central
importance to have good knowledge of both end-effector, object pose and shape.
In this work we propose a framework for markerless visual servoing on unknown
objects, which is divided in four main parts: I) a least-squares minimization
problem is formulated to find the volume of the object graspable by the robot's
hand using its stereo vision; II) a recursive Bayesian filtering technique,
based on Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) filtering, estimates the 6D pose
(position and orientation) of the robot's end-effector without the use of
markers; III) a nonlinear constrained optimization problem is formulated to
compute the desired graspable pose about the object; IV) an image-based visual
servo control commands the robot's end-effector toward the desired pose. We
demonstrate effectiveness and robustness of our approach with extensive
experiments on the iCub humanoid robot platform, achieving real-time
computation, smooth trajectories and sub-pixel precisions
Vision-based Robotic Grasping in Simulation using Deep Reinforcement Learning
This thesis will investigate different robotic manipulation and grasping approaches. It will present an overview of robotic simulation environments, and offer an evaluation of PyBullet, CoppeliaSim, and Gazebo, comparing various features. The thesis further presents a background for current approaches to robotic manipulation and grasping by describing how the robotic movement and grasping can be organized. State-of-the-Art approaches for learning robotic grasping, both using supervised methods and reinforcement learning methods are presented.
Two set of experiments will be conducted in PyBullet, illustrating how Deep Reinforcement Learning methods could be applied to train a 7 degrees of freedom robotic arm to grasp objects
HDPV-SLAM: Hybrid Depth-augmented Panoramic Visual SLAM for Mobile Mapping System with Tilted LiDAR and Panoramic Visual Camera
This paper proposes a novel visual simultaneous localization and mapping
(SLAM) system called Hybrid Depth-augmented Panoramic Visual SLAM (HDPV-SLAM),
that employs a panoramic camera and a tilted multi-beam LiDAR scanner to
generate accurate and metrically-scaled trajectories. RGB-D SLAM was the design
basis for HDPV-SLAM, which added depth information to visual features. It aims
to solve the two major issues hindering the performance of similar SLAM
systems. The first obstacle is the sparseness of LiDAR depth, which makes it
difficult to correlate it with the extracted visual features of the RGB image.
A deep learning-based depth estimation module for iteratively densifying sparse
LiDAR depth was suggested to address this issue. The second issue pertains to
the difficulties in depth association caused by a lack of horizontal overlap
between the panoramic camera and the tilted LiDAR sensor. To surmount this
difficulty, we present a hybrid depth association module that optimally
combines depth information estimated by two independent procedures,
feature-based triangulation and depth estimation. During a phase of feature
tracking, this hybrid depth association module aims to maximize the use of more
accurate depth information between the triangulated depth with visual features
tracked and the deep learning-based corrected depth. We evaluated the efficacy
of HDPV-SLAM using the 18.95 km-long York University and Teledyne Optech (YUTO)
MMS dataset. The experimental results demonstrate that the two proposed modules
contribute substantially to the performance of HDPV-SLAM, which surpasses that
of the state-of-the-art (SOTA) SLAM systems.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, To be published in IEEE International Conference
on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE) 202
UrbanFly: Uncertainty-Aware Planning for Navigation Amongst High-Rises with Monocular Visual-Inertial SLAM Maps
We present UrbanFly: an uncertainty-aware real-time planning framework for
quadrotor navigation in urban high-rise environments. A core aspect of UrbanFly
is its ability to robustly plan directly on the sparse point clouds generated
by a Monocular Visual Inertial SLAM (VINS) backend. It achieves this by using
the sparse point clouds to build an uncertainty-integrated cuboid
representation of the environment through a data-driven monocular plane
segmentation network. Our chosen world model provides faster distance queries
than the more common voxel-grid representation, and UrbanFly leverages this
capability in two different ways leading to as many trajectory optimizers. The
first optimizer uses a gradient-free cross-entropy method to compute
trajectories that minimize collision probability and smoothness cost. Our
second optimizer is a simplified version of the first and uses a sequential
convex programming optimizer initialized based on probabilistic safety
estimates on a set of randomly drawn trajectories. Both our trajectory
optimizers are made computationally tractable and independent of the nature of
underlying uncertainty by embedding the distribution of collision violations in
Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space. Empowered by the algorithmic innovation,
UrbanFly outperforms competing baselines in metrics such as collision rate,
trajectory length, etc., on a high fidelity AirSim simulator augmented with
synthetic and real-world dataset scenes.Comment: Submitted to IROS 2022, Code available at
https://github.com/sudarshan-s-harithas/UrbanFl
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