MATLAB toolboxes: robotics and vision for students and teachers

In this column, Dr. Peter Corke of CSIRO, Australia, gives us a description of MATLAB Toolboxes he has developed. He has been passionately developing tools to enable students and teachers to better understand the theoretical concepts behind classical robotics and computer vision through easy and intuitive simulation and visualization. The results of this labor of love have been packaged as MATLAB Toolboxes: the Robotics Toolbox and the Vision Toolbox. –Daniela Rus, RAS Education Cochai

Practical application of pseudospectral optimization to robot path planning

To obtain minimum time or minimum energy trajectories for robots it is necessary to employ planning methods which adequately consider the platform’s dynamic properties. A variety of sampling, graph-based or local receding-horizon optimisation methods have previously been proposed. These typically use simplified kino-dynamic models to avoid the significant computational burden of solving this problem in a high dimensional state-space. In this paper we investigate solutions from the class of pseudospectral optimisation methods which have grown in favour amongst the optimal control community in recent years. These methods have high computational efficiency and rapid convergence properties. We present a practical application of such an approach to the robot path planning problem to provide a trajectory considering the robot’s dynamic properties. We extend the existing literature by augmenting the path constraints with sensed obstacles rather than predefined analytical functions to enable real world application

Modelling Local Deep Convolutional Neural Network Features to Improve Fine-Grained Image Classification

We propose a local modelling approach using deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for fine-grained image classification. Recently, deep CNNs trained from large datasets have considerably improved the performance of object recognition. However, to date there has been limited work using these deep CNNs as local feature extractors. This partly stems from CNNs having internal representations which are high dimensional, thereby making such representations difficult to model using stochastic models. To overcome this issue, we propose to reduce the dimensionality of one of the internal fully connected layers, in conjunction with layer-restricted retraining to avoid retraining the entire network. The distribution of low-dimensional features obtained from the modified layer is then modelled using a Gaussian mixture model. Comparative experiments show that considerable performance improvements can be achieved on the challenging Fish and UEC FOOD-100 datasets.Comment: 5 pages, three figure

Virtual fences for controlling cows

We describe a moving virtual fence algorithm for herding cows. Each animal in the herd is given a smart collar consisting of a GPS, PDA, wireless networking and a sound amplifier. Using the GPS, the animal's location can be verified relative to the fence boundary. When approaching the perimeter, the animal is presented with a sound stimulus whose effect is to move away. We have developed the virtual fence control algorithm for moving a herd. We present simulation results and data from experiments with 8 cows equipped with smart collars

Robot Navigation in Unseen Spaces using an Abstract Map

Human navigation in built environments depends on symbolic spatial information which has unrealised potential to enhance robot navigation capabilities. Information sources such as labels, signs, maps, planners, spoken directions, and navigational gestures communicate a wealth of spatial information to the navigators of built environments; a wealth of information that robots typically ignore. We present a robot navigation system that uses the same symbolic spatial information employed by humans to purposefully navigate in unseen built environments with a level of performance comparable to humans. The navigation system uses a novel data structure called the abstract map to imagine malleable spatial models for unseen spaces from spatial symbols. Sensorimotor perceptions from a robot are then employed to provide purposeful navigation to symbolic goal locations in the unseen environment. We show how a dynamic system can be used to create malleable spatial models for the abstract map, and provide an open source implementation to encourage future work in the area of symbolic navigation. Symbolic navigation performance of humans and a robot is evaluated in a real-world built environment. The paper concludes with a qualitative analysis of human navigation strategies, providing further insights into how the symbolic navigation capabilities of robots in unseen built environments can be improved in the future.Comment: 15 pages, published in IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems (http://doi.org/10.1109/TCDS.2020.2993855), see https://btalb.github.io/abstract_map/ for access to softwar

Multi-View Picking: Next-best-view Reaching for Improved Grasping in Clutter

Camera viewpoint selection is an important aspect of visual grasp detection, especially in clutter where many occlusions are present. Where other approaches use a static camera position or fixed data collection routines, our Multi-View Picking (MVP) controller uses an active perception approach to choose informative viewpoints based directly on a distribution of grasp pose estimates in real time, reducing uncertainty in the grasp poses caused by clutter and occlusions. In trials of grasping 20 objects from clutter, our MVP controller achieves 80% grasp success, outperforming a single-viewpoint grasp detector by 12%. We also show that our approach is both more accurate and more efficient than approaches which consider multiple fixed viewpoints.Comment: ICRA 2019 Video: https://youtu.be/Vn3vSPKlaEk Code: https://github.com/dougsm/mvp_gras

Tuning Modular Networks with Weighted Losses for Hand-Eye Coordination

This paper introduces an end-to-end fine-tuning method to improve hand-eye coordination in modular deep visuo-motor policies (modular networks) where each module is trained independently. Benefiting from weighted losses, the fine-tuning method significantly improves the performance of the policies for a robotic planar reaching task.Comment: 2 pages, to appear in the Deep Learning for Robotic Vision (DLRV) Workshop in CVPR 201

Visual Servoing from Deep Neural Networks

We present a deep neural network-based method to perform high-precision, robust and real-time 6 DOF visual servoing. The paper describes how to create a dataset simulating various perturbations (occlusions and lighting conditions) from a single real-world image of the scene. A convolutional neural network is fine-tuned using this dataset to estimate the relative pose between two images of the same scene. The output of the network is then employed in a visual servoing control scheme. The method converges robustly even in difficult real-world settings with strong lighting variations and occlusions.A positioning error of less than one millimeter is obtained in experiments with a 6 DOF robot.Comment: fixed authors lis