1,102 research outputs found
Learning to See the Wood for the Trees: Deep Laser Localization in Urban and Natural Environments on a CPU
Localization in challenging, natural environments such as forests or
woodlands is an important capability for many applications from guiding a robot
navigating along a forest trail to monitoring vegetation growth with handheld
sensors. In this work we explore laser-based localization in both urban and
natural environments, which is suitable for online applications. We propose a
deep learning approach capable of learning meaningful descriptors directly from
3D point clouds by comparing triplets (anchor, positive and negative examples).
The approach learns a feature space representation for a set of segmented point
clouds that are matched between a current and previous observations. Our
learning method is tailored towards loop closure detection resulting in a small
model which can be deployed using only a CPU. The proposed learning method
would allow the full pipeline to run on robots with limited computational
payload such as drones, quadrupeds or UGVs.Comment: Accepted for publication at RA-L/ICRA 2019. More info:
https://ori.ox.ac.uk/esm-localizatio
Vision-based legged robot navigation: localisation, local planning, learning
The recent advances in legged locomotion control have made legged robots walk up staircases, go deep into underground caves, and walk in the forest. Nevertheless, autonomously achieving this task is still a challenge. Navigating and acomplishing missions in the wild relies not only on robust low-level controllers but also higher-level representations and perceptual systems that are aware of the robot's capabilities.
This thesis addresses the navigation problem for legged robots. The contributions are four systems designed to exploit unique characteristics of these platforms, from the sensing setup to their advanced mobility skills over different terrain. The systems address localisation, scene understanding, and local planning, and advance the capabilities of legged robots in challenging environments.
The first contribution tackles localisation with multi-camera setups available on legged platforms. It proposes a strategy to actively switch between the cameras and stay localised while operating in a visual teach and repeat context---in spite of transient changes in the environment. The second contribution focuses on local planning, effectively adding a safety layer for robot navigation. The approach uses a local map built on-the-fly to generate efficient vector field representations that enable fast and reactive navigation. The third contribution demonstrates how to improve local planning in natural environments by learning robot-specific traversability from demonstrations. The approach leverages classical and learning-based methods to enable online, onboard traversability learning. These systems are demonstrated via different robot deployments on industrial facilities, underground mines, and parklands.
The thesis concludes by presenting a real-world application: an autonomous forest inventory system with legged robots. This last contribution presents a mission planning system for autonomous surveying as well as a data analysis pipeline to extract forestry attributes. The approach was experimentally validated in a field campaign in Finland, evidencing the potential that legged platforms offer for future applications in the wild
LookUP: Vision-Only Real-Time Precise Underground Localisation for Autonomous Mining Vehicles
A key capability for autonomous underground mining vehicles is real-time
accurate localisation. While significant progress has been made, currently
deployed systems have several limitations ranging from dependence on costly
additional infrastructure to failure of both visual and range sensor-based
techniques in highly aliased or visually challenging environments. In our
previous work, we presented a lightweight coarse vision-based localisation
system that could map and then localise to within a few metres in an
underground mining environment. However, this level of precision is
insufficient for providing a cheaper, more reliable vision-based automation
alternative to current range sensor-based systems. Here we present a new
precision localisation system dubbed "LookUP", which learns a
neural-network-based pixel sampling strategy for estimating homographies based
on ceiling-facing cameras without requiring any manual labelling. This new
system runs in real time on limited computation resource and is demonstrated on
two different underground mine sites, achieving real time performance at ~5
frames per second and a much improved average localisation error of ~1.2 metre.Comment: 7 pages, 7 figures, accepted for IEEE ICRA 201
Watching grass grow: long-term visual navigation and mission planning for autonomous biodiversity monitoring
We describe a challenging robotics deployment in a complex ecosystem to monitor a rich plant community. The study site is dominated by dynamic grassland vegetation and is thus visually ambiguous and liable to drastic appearance change over the course of a day and especially through the growing season. This dynamism and complexity in appearance seriously impact the stability of the robotics platform, as localisation is a foundational part of that control loop, and so routes must be carefully taught and retaught until autonomy is robust and repeatable. Our system is demonstrated over a 6-week period monitoring the response of grass species to experimental climate-change manipulations. We also discuss the applicability of our pipeline to monitor biodiversity in other complex natural settings
Image features for visual teach-and-repeat navigation in changing environments
We present an evaluation of standard image features in the context of long-term visual teach-and-repeat navigation of mobile robots, where the environment exhibits significant changes in appearance caused by seasonal weather variations and daily illumination changes. We argue that for long-term autonomous navigation, the viewpoint-, scale- and rotation- invariance of the standard feature extractors is less important than their robustness to the mid- and long-term environment appearance changes. Therefore, we focus our evaluation on the robustness of image registration to variable lighting and naturally-occurring seasonal changes. We combine detection and description components of different image extractors and evaluate their performance on five datasets collected by mobile vehicles in three different outdoor environments over the course of one year. Moreover, we propose a trainable feature descriptor based on a combination of evolutionary algorithms and Binary Robust Independent Elementary Features, which we call GRIEF (Generated BRIEF). In terms of robustness to seasonal changes, the most promising results were achieved by the SpG/CNN and the STAR/GRIEF feature, which was slightly less robust, but faster to calculate
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