2,160 research outputs found
Assessing temporal behavior in lidar point clouds of urban environments
Self-driving cars and robots that run autonomously over long periods of time need high-precision and up-to-date models of the changing environment. The main challenge for creating long term maps of dynamic environments is to identify changes and adapt the map continuously. Changes can occur abruptly, gradually, or even periodically. In this work, we investigate how dense mapping data of several epochs can be used to identify the temporal behavior of the environment. This approach anticipates possible future scenarios where a large fleet of vehicles is equipped with sensors which continuously capture the environment. This data is then being sent to a cloud based infrastructure, which aligns all datasets geometrically and subsequently runs scene analysis on it, among these being the analysis for temporal changes of the environment. Our experiments are based on a LiDAR mobile mapping dataset which consists of 150 scan strips (a total of about 1 billion points), which were obtained in multiple epochs. Parts of the scene are covered by up to 28 scan strips. The time difference between the first and last epoch is about one year. In order to process the data, the scan strips are aligned using an overall bundle adjustment, which estimates the surface (about one billion surface element unknowns) as well as 270,000 unknowns for the adjustment of the exterior orientation parameters. After this, the surface misalignment is usually below one centimeter. In the next step, we perform a segmentation of the point clouds using a region growing algorithm. The segmented objects and the aligned data are then used to compute an occupancy grid which is filled by tracing each individual LiDAR ray from the scan head to every point of a segment. As a result, we can assess the behavior of each segment in the scene and remove voxels from temporal objects from the global occupancy grid.DFG/GRK/215
Dynamic Occupancy Grid Prediction for Urban Autonomous Driving: A Deep Learning Approach with Fully Automatic Labeling
Long-term situation prediction plays a crucial role in the development of
intelligent vehicles. A major challenge still to overcome is the prediction of
complex downtown scenarios with multiple road users, e.g., pedestrians, bikes,
and motor vehicles, interacting with each other. This contribution tackles this
challenge by combining a Bayesian filtering technique for environment
representation, and machine learning as long-term predictor. More specifically,
a dynamic occupancy grid map is utilized as input to a deep convolutional
neural network. This yields the advantage of using spatially distributed
velocity estimates from a single time step for prediction, rather than a raw
data sequence, alleviating common problems dealing with input time series of
multiple sensors. Furthermore, convolutional neural networks have the inherent
characteristic of using context information, enabling the implicit modeling of
road user interaction. Pixel-wise balancing is applied in the loss function
counteracting the extreme imbalance between static and dynamic cells. One of
the major advantages is the unsupervised learning character due to fully
automatic label generation. The presented algorithm is trained and evaluated on
multiple hours of recorded sensor data and compared to Monte-Carlo simulation
3D Reconstruction & Assessment Framework based on affordable 2D Lidar
Lidar is extensively used in the industry and mass-market. Due to its
measurement accuracy and insensitivity to illumination compared to cameras, It
is applied onto a broad range of applications, like geodetic engineering, self
driving cars or virtual reality. But the 3D Lidar with multi-beam is very
expensive, and the massive measurements data can not be fully leveraged on some
constrained platforms. The purpose of this paper is to explore the possibility
of using cheap 2D Lidar off-the-shelf, to preform complex 3D Reconstruction,
moreover, the generated 3D map quality is evaluated by our proposed metrics at
the end. The 3D map is constructed in two ways, one way in which the scan is
performed at known positions with an external rotary axis at another plane. The
other way, in which the 2D Lidar for mapping and another 2D Lidar for
localization are placed on a trolley, the trolley is pushed on the ground
arbitrarily. The generated maps by different approaches are converted to
octomaps uniformly before the evaluation. The similarity and difference between
two maps will be evaluated by the proposed metrics thoroughly. The whole
mapping system is composed of several modular components. A 3D bracket was made
for assembling of the Lidar with a long range, the driver and the motor
together. A cover platform made for the IMU and 2D Lidar with a shorter range
but high accuracy. The software is stacked up in different ROS packages.Comment: 7 pages, 9 Postscript figures. Accepted by 2018 IEEE International
Conference on Advanced Intelligent Mechatronic
Multi-sensor based object detection in driving scenes
The work done in this internship consists in two main part. The first part is the design of an experimental platform to acquire data for testing and training. To design the experiments, onboard and onroad sensors have been considered. A calibration process has been conducted in order to integrated all the data from different sources. The second part was the use of a stereo system and a laser scanner to extract the free navigable space and to detect obstacles. This has been conducted through the use of an occupancy grid map representation
End-to-End Tracking and Semantic Segmentation Using Recurrent Neural Networks
In this work we present a novel end-to-end framework for tracking and
classifying a robot's surroundings in complex, dynamic and only partially
observable real-world environments. The approach deploys a recurrent neural
network to filter an input stream of raw laser measurements in order to
directly infer object locations, along with their identity in both visible and
occluded areas. To achieve this we first train the network using unsupervised
Deep Tracking, a recently proposed theoretical framework for end-to-end space
occupancy prediction. We show that by learning to track on a large amount of
unsupervised data, the network creates a rich internal representation of its
environment which we in turn exploit through the principle of inductive
transfer of knowledge to perform the task of it's semantic classification. As a
result, we show that only a small amount of labelled data suffices to steer the
network towards mastering this additional task. Furthermore we propose a novel
recurrent neural network architecture specifically tailored to tracking and
semantic classification in real-world robotics applications. We demonstrate the
tracking and classification performance of the method on real-world data
collected at a busy road junction. Our evaluation shows that the proposed
end-to-end framework compares favourably to a state-of-the-art, model-free
tracking solution and that it outperforms a conventional one-shot training
scheme for semantic classification
Conceptual spatial representations for indoor mobile robots
We present an approach for creating conceptual representations of human-made indoor environments using mobile
robots. The concepts refer to spatial and functional properties of typical indoor environments. Following ļ¬ndings
in cognitive psychology, our model is composed of layers representing maps at diļ¬erent levels of abstraction. The
complete system is integrated in a mobile robot endowed with laser and vision sensors for place and object recognition.
The system also incorporates a linguistic framework that actively supports the map acquisition process, and which
is used for situated dialogue. Finally, we discuss the capabilities of the integrated system
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