A distributed architecture for unmanned aerial systems based on publish/subscribe messaging and simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM) testbed

A dissertation submitted in fulfilment for the degree of Master of Science. School of Computational and Applied Mathematics, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, November 2017The increased capabilities and lower cost of Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) unveil big opportunities for a rapidly growing number of civilian and commercial applications. Some missions require direct control using a receiver in a point-to-point connection, involving one or very few MAVs. An alternative class of mission is remotely controlled, with the control of the drone automated to a certain extent using mission planning software and autopilot systems. For most emerging missions, there is a need for more autonomous, cooperative control of MAVs, as well as more complex data processing from sensors like cameras and laser scanners. In the last decade, this has given rise to an extensive research from both academia and industry. This research direction applies robotics and computer vision concepts to Unmanned Aerial Systems (UASs). However, UASs are often designed for specific hardware and software, thus providing limited integration, interoperability and re-usability across different missions. In addition, there are numerous open issues related to UAS command, control and communication(C3), and multi-MAVs. We argue and elaborate throughout this dissertation that some of the recent standardbased publish/subscribe communication protocols can solve many of these challenges and meet the non-functional requirements of MAV robotics applications. This dissertation assesses the MQTT, DDS and TCPROS protocols in a distributed architecture of a UAS control system and Ground Control Station software. While TCPROS has been the leading robotics communication transport for ROS applications, MQTT and DDS are lightweight enough to be used for data exchange between distributed systems of aerial robots. Furthermore, MQTT and DDS are based on industry standards to foster communication interoperability of “things”. Both protocols have been extensively presented to address many of today’s needs related to networks based on the internet of things (IoT). For example, MQTT has been used to exchange data with space probes, whereas DDS was employed for aerospace defence and applications of smart cities. We designed and implemented a distributed UAS architecture based on each publish/subscribe protocol TCPROS, MQTT and DDS. The proposed communication systems were tested with a vision-based Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM) system involving three Parrot AR Drone2 MAVs. Within the context of this study, MQTT and DDS messaging frameworks serve the purpose of abstracting UAS complexity and heterogeneity. Additionally, these protocols are expected to provide low-latency communication and scale up to meet the requirements of real-time remote sensing applications. The most important contribution of this work is the implementation of a complete distributed communication architecture for multi-MAVs. Furthermore, we assess the viability of this architecture and benchmark the performance of the protocols in relation to an autonomous quadcopter navigation testbed composed of a SLAM algorithm, an extended Kalman filter and a PID controller.XL201

Integrated Sensing and Communication for 6G: Ten Key Machine Learning Roles

Integrating sensing and communication is a defining theme for future wireless systems. This is motivated by the promising performance gains, especially as they assist each other, and by the better utilization of the wireless and hardware resources. Realizing these gains in practice, however, is subject to several challenges where leveraging machine learning can provide a potential solution. This article focuses on ten key machine learning roles for joint sensing and communication, sensing-aided communication, and communication-aided sensing systems, explains why and how machine learning can be utilized, and highlights important directions for future research. The article also presents real-world results for some of these machine learning roles based on the large-scale real-world dataset DeepSense 6G, which could be adopted in investigating a wide range of integrated sensing and communication problems.Comment: Submitted to IEE

Towards High-Frequency Tracking and Fast Edge-Aware Optimization

This dissertation advances the state of the art for AR/VR tracking systems by increasing the tracking frequency by orders of magnitude and proposes an efficient algorithm for the problem of edge-aware optimization. AR/VR is a natural way of interacting with computers, where the physical and digital worlds coexist. We are on the cusp of a radical change in how humans perform and interact with computing. Humans are sensitive to small misalignments between the real and the virtual world, and tracking at kilo-Hertz frequencies becomes essential. Current vision-based systems fall short, as their tracking frequency is implicitly limited by the frame-rate of the camera. This thesis presents a prototype system which can track at orders of magnitude higher than the state-of-the-art methods using multiple commodity cameras. The proposed system exploits characteristics of the camera traditionally considered as flaws, namely rolling shutter and radial distortion. The experimental evaluation shows the effectiveness of the method for various degrees of motion. Furthermore, edge-aware optimization is an indispensable tool in the computer vision arsenal for accurate filtering of depth-data and image-based rendering, which is increasingly being used for content creation and geometry processing for AR/VR. As applications increasingly demand higher resolution and speed, there exists a need to develop methods that scale accordingly. This dissertation proposes such an edge-aware optimization framework which is efficient, accurate, and algorithmically scales well, all of which are much desirable traits not found jointly in the state of the art. The experiments show the effectiveness of the framework in a multitude of computer vision tasks such as computational photography and stereo.Comment: PhD thesi

Online Graph-Based Change Point Detection in Multiband Image Sequences

The automatic detection of changes or anomalies between multispectral and hyperspectral images collected at different time instants is an active and challenging research topic. To effectively perform change-point detection in multitemporal images, it is important to devise techniques that are computationally efficient for processing large datasets, and that do not require knowledge about the nature of the changes. In this paper, we introduce a novel online framework for detecting changes in multitemporal remote sensing images. Acting on neighboring spectra as adjacent vertices in a graph, this algorithm focuses on anomalies concurrently activating groups of vertices corresponding to compact, well-connected and spectrally homogeneous image regions. It fully benefits from recent advances in graph signal processing to exploit the characteristics of the data that lie on irregular supports. Moreover, the graph is estimated directly from the images using superpixel decomposition algorithms. The learning algorithm is scalable in the sense that it is efficient and spatially distributed. Experiments illustrate the detection and localization performance of the method

Modeling and Control for Vision Based Rear Wheel Drive Robot and Solving Indoor SLAM Problem Using LIDAR

abstract: To achieve the ambitious long-term goal of a feet of cooperating Flexible Autonomous Machines operating in an uncertain Environment (FAME), this thesis addresses several critical modeling, design, control objectives for rear-wheel drive ground vehicles. Toward this ambitious goal, several critical objectives are addressed. One central objective of the thesis was to show how to build low-cost multi-capability robot platform that can be used for conducting FAME research. A TFC-KIT car chassis was augmented to provide a suite of substantive capabilities. The augmented vehicle (FreeSLAM Robot) costs less than $500 but offers the capability of commercially available vehicles costing over$2000. All demonstrations presented involve rear-wheel drive FreeSLAM robot. The following summarizes the key hardware demonstrations presented and analyzed: (1)Cruise (v, ) control along a line, (2) Cruise (v, ) control along a curve, (3) Planar (x, y) Cartesian Stabilization for rear wheel drive vehicle, (4) Finish the track with camera pan tilt structure in minimum time, (5) Finish the track without camera pan tilt structure in minimum time, (6) Vision based tracking performance with different cruise speed vx, (7) Vision based tracking performance with different camera fixed look-ahead distance L, (8) Vision based tracking performance with different delay Td from vision subsystem, (9) Manually remote controlled robot to perform indoor SLAM, (10) Autonomously line guided robot to perform indoor SLAM. For most cases, hardware data is compared with, and corroborated by, model based simulation data. In short, the thesis uses low-cost self-designed rear-wheel drive robot to demonstrate many capabilities that are critical in order to reach the longer-term FAME goal.Dissertation/ThesisDefense PresentationMasters Thesis Electrical Engineering 201

Event-based Vision: A Survey

Event cameras are bio-inspired sensors that differ from conventional frame cameras: Instead of capturing images at a fixed rate, they asynchronously measure per-pixel brightness changes, and output a stream of events that encode the time, location and sign of the brightness changes. Event cameras offer attractive properties compared to traditional cameras: high temporal resolution (in the order of microseconds), very high dynamic range (140 dB vs. 60 dB), low power consumption, and high pixel bandwidth (on the order of kHz) resulting in reduced motion blur. Hence, event cameras have a large potential for robotics and computer vision in challenging scenarios for traditional cameras, such as low-latency, high speed, and high dynamic range. However, novel methods are required to process the unconventional output of these sensors in order to unlock their potential. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the emerging field of event-based vision, with a focus on the applications and the algorithms developed to unlock the outstanding properties of event cameras. We present event cameras from their working principle, the actual sensors that are available and the tasks that they have been used for, from low-level vision (feature detection and tracking, optic flow, etc.) to high-level vision (reconstruction, segmentation, recognition). We also discuss the techniques developed to process events, including learning-based techniques, as well as specialized processors for these novel sensors, such as spiking neural networks. Additionally, we highlight the challenges that remain to be tackled and the opportunities that lie ahead in the search for a more efficient, bio-inspired way for machines to perceive and interact with the world