2,010 research outputs found
Topomap: Topological Mapping and Navigation Based on Visual SLAM Maps
Visual robot navigation within large-scale, semi-structured environments
deals with various challenges such as computation intensive path planning
algorithms or insufficient knowledge about traversable spaces. Moreover, many
state-of-the-art navigation approaches only operate locally instead of gaining
a more conceptual understanding of the planning objective. This limits the
complexity of tasks a robot can accomplish and makes it harder to deal with
uncertainties that are present in the context of real-time robotics
applications. In this work, we present Topomap, a framework which simplifies
the navigation task by providing a map to the robot which is tailored for path
planning use. This novel approach transforms a sparse feature-based map from a
visual Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) system into a
three-dimensional topological map. This is done in two steps. First, we extract
occupancy information directly from the noisy sparse point cloud. Then, we
create a set of convex free-space clusters, which are the vertices of the
topological map. We show that this representation improves the efficiency of
global planning, and we provide a complete derivation of our algorithm.
Planning experiments on real world datasets demonstrate that we achieve similar
performance as RRT* with significantly lower computation times and storage
requirements. Finally, we test our algorithm on a mobile robotic platform to
prove its advantages.Comment: 8 page
DS-SLAM: A Semantic Visual SLAM towards Dynamic Environments
Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) is considered to be a
fundamental capability for intelligent mobile robots. Over the past decades,
many impressed SLAM systems have been developed and achieved good performance
under certain circumstances. However, some problems are still not well solved,
for example, how to tackle the moving objects in the dynamic environments, how
to make the robots truly understand the surroundings and accomplish advanced
tasks. In this paper, a robust semantic visual SLAM towards dynamic
environments named DS-SLAM is proposed. Five threads run in parallel in
DS-SLAM: tracking, semantic segmentation, local mapping, loop closing, and
dense semantic map creation. DS-SLAM combines semantic segmentation network
with moving consistency check method to reduce the impact of dynamic objects,
and thus the localization accuracy is highly improved in dynamic environments.
Meanwhile, a dense semantic octo-tree map is produced, which could be employed
for high-level tasks. We conduct experiments both on TUM RGB-D dataset and in
the real-world environment. The results demonstrate the absolute trajectory
accuracy in DS-SLAM can be improved by one order of magnitude compared with
ORB-SLAM2. It is one of the state-of-the-art SLAM systems in high-dynamic
environments. Now the code is available at our github:
https://github.com/ivipsourcecode/DS-SLAMComment: 7 pages, accepted at the 2018 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on
Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2018). Now the code is available at our
github: https://github.com/ivipsourcecode/DS-SLA
From Monocular SLAM to Autonomous Drone Exploration
Micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) are strongly limited in their payload and power
capacity. In order to implement autonomous navigation, algorithms are therefore
desirable that use sensory equipment that is as small, low-weight, and
low-power consuming as possible. In this paper, we propose a method for
autonomous MAV navigation and exploration using a low-cost consumer-grade
quadrocopter equipped with a monocular camera. Our vision-based navigation
system builds on LSD-SLAM which estimates the MAV trajectory and a semi-dense
reconstruction of the environment in real-time. Since LSD-SLAM only determines
depth at high gradient pixels, texture-less areas are not directly observed so
that previous exploration methods that assume dense map information cannot
directly be applied. We propose an obstacle mapping and exploration approach
that takes the properties of our semi-dense monocular SLAM system into account.
In experiments, we demonstrate our vision-based autonomous navigation and
exploration system with a Parrot Bebop MAV
C-blox: A Scalable and Consistent TSDF-based Dense Mapping Approach
In many applications, maintaining a consistent dense map of the environment
is key to enabling robotic platforms to perform higher level decision making.
Several works have addressed the challenge of creating precise dense 3D maps
from visual sensors providing depth information. However, during operation over
longer missions, reconstructions can easily become inconsistent due to
accumulated camera tracking error and delayed loop closure. Without explicitly
addressing the problem of map consistency, recovery from such distortions tends
to be difficult. We present a novel system for dense 3D mapping which addresses
the challenge of building consistent maps while dealing with scalability.
Central to our approach is the representation of the environment as a
collection of overlapping TSDF subvolumes. These subvolumes are localized
through feature-based camera tracking and bundle adjustment. Our main
contribution is a pipeline for identifying stable regions in the map, and to
fuse the contributing subvolumes. This approach allows us to reduce map growth
while still maintaining consistency. We demonstrate the proposed system on a
publicly available dataset and simulation engine, and demonstrate the efficacy
of the proposed approach for building consistent and scalable maps. Finally we
demonstrate our approach running in real-time on-board a lightweight MAV.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, conferenc
Efficient Online Surface Correction for Real-time Large-Scale 3D Reconstruction
State-of-the-art methods for large-scale 3D reconstruction from RGB-D sensors
usually reduce drift in camera tracking by globally optimizing the estimated
camera poses in real-time without simultaneously updating the reconstructed
surface on pose changes. We propose an efficient on-the-fly surface correction
method for globally consistent dense 3D reconstruction of large-scale scenes.
Our approach uses a dense Visual RGB-D SLAM system that estimates the camera
motion in real-time on a CPU and refines it in a global pose graph
optimization. Consecutive RGB-D frames are locally fused into keyframes, which
are incorporated into a sparse voxel hashed Signed Distance Field (SDF) on the
GPU. On pose graph updates, the SDF volume is corrected on-the-fly using a
novel keyframe re-integration strategy with reduced GPU-host streaming. We
demonstrate in an extensive quantitative evaluation that our method is up to
93% more runtime efficient compared to the state-of-the-art and requires
significantly less memory, with only negligible loss of surface quality.
Overall, our system requires only a single GPU and allows for real-time surface
correction of large environments.Comment: British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC), London, September 201
Efficient Online Surface Correction for Real-time Large-Scale 3D Reconstruction
State-of-the-art methods for large-scale 3D reconstruction from RGB-D sensors
usually reduce drift in camera tracking by globally optimizing the estimated
camera poses in real-time without simultaneously updating the reconstructed
surface on pose changes. We propose an efficient on-the-fly surface correction
method for globally consistent dense 3D reconstruction of large-scale scenes.
Our approach uses a dense Visual RGB-D SLAM system that estimates the camera
motion in real-time on a CPU and refines it in a global pose graph
optimization. Consecutive RGB-D frames are locally fused into keyframes, which
are incorporated into a sparse voxel hashed Signed Distance Field (SDF) on the
GPU. On pose graph updates, the SDF volume is corrected on-the-fly using a
novel keyframe re-integration strategy with reduced GPU-host streaming. We
demonstrate in an extensive quantitative evaluation that our method is up to
93% more runtime efficient compared to the state-of-the-art and requires
significantly less memory, with only negligible loss of surface quality.
Overall, our system requires only a single GPU and allows for real-time surface
correction of large environments.Comment: British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC), London, September 201
SurfelMeshing: Online Surfel-Based Mesh Reconstruction
We address the problem of mesh reconstruction from live RGB-D video, assuming
a calibrated camera and poses provided externally (e.g., by a SLAM system). In
contrast to most existing approaches, we do not fuse depth measurements in a
volume but in a dense surfel cloud. We asynchronously (re)triangulate the
smoothed surfels to reconstruct a surface mesh. This novel approach enables to
maintain a dense surface representation of the scene during SLAM which can
quickly adapt to loop closures. This is possible by deforming the surfel cloud
and asynchronously remeshing the surface where necessary. The surfel-based
representation also naturally supports strongly varying scan resolution. In
particular, it reconstructs colors at the input camera's resolution. Moreover,
in contrast to many volumetric approaches, ours can reconstruct thin objects
since objects do not need to enclose a volume. We demonstrate our approach in a
number of experiments, showing that it produces reconstructions that are
competitive with the state-of-the-art, and we discuss its advantages and
limitations. The algorithm (excluding loop closure functionality) is available
as open source at https://github.com/puzzlepaint/surfelmeshing .Comment: Version accepted to IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine
Intelligenc
3D Visual Perception for Self-Driving Cars using a Multi-Camera System: Calibration, Mapping, Localization, and Obstacle Detection
Cameras are a crucial exteroceptive sensor for self-driving cars as they are
low-cost and small, provide appearance information about the environment, and
work in various weather conditions. They can be used for multiple purposes such
as visual navigation and obstacle detection. We can use a surround multi-camera
system to cover the full 360-degree field-of-view around the car. In this way,
we avoid blind spots which can otherwise lead to accidents. To minimize the
number of cameras needed for surround perception, we utilize fisheye cameras.
Consequently, standard vision pipelines for 3D mapping, visual localization,
obstacle detection, etc. need to be adapted to take full advantage of the
availability of multiple cameras rather than treat each camera individually. In
addition, processing of fisheye images has to be supported. In this paper, we
describe the camera calibration and subsequent processing pipeline for
multi-fisheye-camera systems developed as part of the V-Charge project. This
project seeks to enable automated valet parking for self-driving cars. Our
pipeline is able to precisely calibrate multi-camera systems, build sparse 3D
maps for visual navigation, visually localize the car with respect to these
maps, generate accurate dense maps, as well as detect obstacles based on
real-time depth map extraction
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