13,942 research outputs found
Artificial Intelligence and Systems Theory: Applied to Cooperative Robots
This paper describes an approach to the design of a population of cooperative
robots based on concepts borrowed from Systems Theory and Artificial
Intelligence. The research has been developed under the SocRob project, carried
out by the Intelligent Systems Laboratory at the Institute for Systems and
Robotics - Instituto Superior Tecnico (ISR/IST) in Lisbon. The acronym of the
project stands both for "Society of Robots" and "Soccer Robots", the case study
where we are testing our population of robots. Designing soccer robots is a
very challenging problem, where the robots must act not only to shoot a ball
towards the goal, but also to detect and avoid static (walls, stopped robots)
and dynamic (moving robots) obstacles. Furthermore, they must cooperate to
defeat an opposing team. Our past and current research in soccer robotics
includes cooperative sensor fusion for world modeling, object recognition and
tracking, robot navigation, multi-robot distributed task planning and
coordination, including cooperative reinforcement learning in cooperative and
adversarial environments, and behavior-based architectures for real time task
execution of cooperating robot teams
Computational intelligence approaches to robotics, automation, and control [Volume guest editors]
No abstract available
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
Learning Deployable Navigation Policies at Kilometer Scale from a Single Traversal
Model-free reinforcement learning has recently been shown to be effective at
learning navigation policies from complex image input. However, these
algorithms tend to require large amounts of interaction with the environment,
which can be prohibitively costly to obtain on robots in the real world. We
present an approach for efficiently learning goal-directed navigation policies
on a mobile robot, from only a single coverage traversal of recorded data. The
navigation agent learns an effective policy over a diverse action space in a
large heterogeneous environment consisting of more than 2km of travel, through
buildings and outdoor regions that collectively exhibit large variations in
visual appearance, self-similarity, and connectivity. We compare pretrained
visual encoders that enable precomputation of visual embeddings to achieve a
throughput of tens of thousands of transitions per second at training time on a
commodity desktop computer, allowing agents to learn from millions of
trajectories of experience in a matter of hours. We propose multiple forms of
computationally efficient stochastic augmentation to enable the learned policy
to generalise beyond these precomputed embeddings, and demonstrate successful
deployment of the learned policy on the real robot without fine tuning, despite
environmental appearance differences at test time. The dataset and code
required to reproduce these results and apply the technique to other datasets
and robots is made publicly available at rl-navigation.github.io/deployable
A Data-driven Model for Interaction-aware Pedestrian Motion Prediction in Object Cluttered Environments
This paper reports on a data-driven, interaction-aware motion prediction
approach for pedestrians in environments cluttered with static obstacles. When
navigating in such workspaces shared with humans, robots need accurate motion
predictions of the surrounding pedestrians. Human navigation behavior is mostly
influenced by their surrounding pedestrians and by the static obstacles in
their vicinity. In this paper we introduce a new model based on Long-Short Term
Memory (LSTM) neural networks, which is able to learn human motion behavior
from demonstrated data. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first
approach using LSTMs, that incorporates both static obstacles and surrounding
pedestrians for trajectory forecasting. As part of the model, we introduce a
new way of encoding surrounding pedestrians based on a 1d-grid in polar angle
space. We evaluate the benefit of interaction-aware motion prediction and the
added value of incorporating static obstacles on both simulation and real-world
datasets by comparing with state-of-the-art approaches. The results show, that
our new approach outperforms the other approaches while being very
computationally efficient and that taking into account static obstacles for
motion predictions significantly improves the prediction accuracy, especially
in cluttered environments.Comment: 8 pages, accepted for publication at the IEEE International
Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 201
A Data-driven Model for Interaction-aware Pedestrian Motion Prediction in Object Cluttered Environments
This paper reports on a data-driven, interaction-aware motion prediction
approach for pedestrians in environments cluttered with static obstacles. When
navigating in such workspaces shared with humans, robots need accurate motion
predictions of the surrounding pedestrians. Human navigation behavior is mostly
influenced by their surrounding pedestrians and by the static obstacles in
their vicinity. In this paper we introduce a new model based on Long-Short Term
Memory (LSTM) neural networks, which is able to learn human motion behavior
from demonstrated data. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first
approach using LSTMs, that incorporates both static obstacles and surrounding
pedestrians for trajectory forecasting. As part of the model, we introduce a
new way of encoding surrounding pedestrians based on a 1d-grid in polar angle
space. We evaluate the benefit of interaction-aware motion prediction and the
added value of incorporating static obstacles on both simulation and real-world
datasets by comparing with state-of-the-art approaches. The results show, that
our new approach outperforms the other approaches while being very
computationally efficient and that taking into account static obstacles for
motion predictions significantly improves the prediction accuracy, especially
in cluttered environments.Comment: 8 pages, accepted for publication at the IEEE International
Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 201
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