Towards Odor-Sensitive Mobile Robots

J. Monroy, J. Gonzalez-Jimenez, "Towards Odor-Sensitive Mobile Robots", Electronic Nose Technologies and Advances in Machine Olfaction, IGI Global, pp. 244--263, 2018, doi:10.4018/978-1-5225-3862-2.ch012 Versión preprint, con permiso del editorOut of all the components of a mobile robot, its sensorial system is undoubtedly among the most critical ones when operating in real environments. Until now, these sensorial systems mostly relied on range sensors (laser scanner, sonar, active triangulation) and cameras. While electronic noses have barely been employed, they can provide a complementary sensory information, vital for some applications, as with humans. This chapter analyzes the motivation of providing a robot with gas-sensing capabilities and also reviews some of the hurdles that are preventing smell from achieving the importance of other sensing modalities in robotics. The achievements made so far are reviewed to illustrate the current status on the three main fields within robotics olfaction: the classification of volatile substances, the spatial estimation of the gas dispersion from sparse measurements, and the localization of the gas source within a known environment

Real-Time odor classification through sequential bayesian filtering

The classification of volatiles substances with an e-nose is still a challenging problem, particularly when working under real-time, out-of-the-lab environmental conditions where the chaotic and highly dynamic characteristics of the gas transportation induce an almost permanent transient state in the e-nose readings. In this work, a sequential Bayesian filtering approach is proposed to efficiently integrate information from previous e-nose observations while updating the belief about the gas class on a real-time basis. We validate our proposal with two real olfaction datasets composed of dynamic time-series experiments (gas transitions are Considered, but no mixture of gases), showing an improvement in the classification rate when compared to a stand-alone probabilistic classifier.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Convex Global 3D Registration with Lagrangian Duality

The registration of 3D models by a Euclidean transformation is a fundamental task at the core of many application in computer vision. This problem is non-convex due to the presence of rotational constraints, making traditional local optimization methods prone to getting stuck in local minima. This paper addresses finding the globally optimal transformation in various 3D registration problems by a unified formulation that integrates common geometric registration modalities (namely point-to-point, point-to-line and point-to-plane). This formulation renders the optimization problem independent of both the number and nature of the correspondences. The main novelty of our proposal is the introduction of a strengthened Lagrangian dual relaxation for this problem, which surpasses previous similar approaches [32] in effectiveness. In fact, even though with no theoretical guarantees, exhaustive empirical evaluation in both synthetic and real experiments always resulted on a tight relaxation that allowed to recover a guaranteed globally optimal solution by exploiting duality theory. Thus, our approach allows for effectively solving the 3D registration with global optimality guarantees while running at a fraction of the time for the state-of-the-art alternative [34], based on a more computationally intensive Branch and Bound method.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Initialization of 3D Pose Graph Optimization using Lagrangian duality

Pose Graph Optimization (PGO) is the de facto choice to solve the trajectory of an agent in Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). The Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) for PGO is a non-convex problem for which no known technique is able to guarantee a globally optimal solution under general conditions. In recent years, Lagrangian duality has proved suitable to provide good, frequently tight relaxations of the hard PGO problem through convex Semidefinite Programming (SDP). In this work, we build from the state-of-the-art Lagrangian relaxation [1] and contribute a complete recovery procedure that, given the (tractable) optimal solution of the relaxation, provides either the optimal MLE solution if the relaxation is tight, or a remarkably good feasible guess if the relaxation is non-tight, which occurs in specially challenging PGO problems (very noisy observations, low graph connectivity, etc.). In the latter case, when used for initialization of local iterative methods, our approach outperforms other state-ofthe- art approaches converging to better solutions. We support our claims with extensive experiments.University of Malaga travel grant, the Spanish grant program FPU14/06098 and the project PROMOVE (DPI2014-55826-R), funded by the Spanish Government and the "European Regional Development Fund". Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Gas Source Localization Strategies for Teleoperated Mobile Robots. An Experimental Analysis

Gas source localization (GSL) is one of the most important and direct applications of a gas sensitive mobile robot, and consists in searching for one or multiple volatile emission sources with a mobile robot that has improved sensing capabilities (i.e. olfaction, wind flow, etc.). This work adresses GSL by employing a teleoperated mobile robot, and focuses on which search strategy is the most suitable for this teleoperated approach. Four different search strategies, namely chemotaxis, anemotaxis, gas-mapping, and visual-aided search, are analyzed and evaluated according to a set of proposed indicators (e.g. accuracy, efficiency, success rate, etc.) to determine the most suitable one for a human-teleoperated mobile robot. Experimental validation is carried out employing a large dataset composed of over 150 trials where volunteer operators had to locate a gas-leak in a virtual environment under various and realistic environmental conditions (i.e. different wind flow patterns and gas source locations). We report different findings, from which we highlight that, against intuition, visual-aided search is not always the best strategy, but depends on the environmental conditions and the operator’s ability to understand how gas distributes.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Stereo visual odometry by combining points and lines

Poster presented at ICVSS2016: international Computer Vision Summer SchoolMost approaches to stereo visual odometry reconstruct the motion based on the tracking of point features along a sequence of images. However, in low-textured scenes it is often difficult to encounter a large set of point features, or it may happen that they are not well distributed over the image, so that the behavior of these algorithms deteriorates. This paper proposes a probabilistic approach to stereo visual odometry based on the combination of both point and line segment that works robustly in a wide variety of scenarios. The camera motion is recovered through non-linear minimization of the projection errors of both point and line segment features. The method, of course, is computationally more expensive that using only one type of feature, but still can run in real-time on a standard computer and provides interesting advantages, including a straightforward integration into any probabilistic framework commonly employed in mobile robotics.Universidad de Málag

Robust Stereo Visual Odometry through a Probabilistic Combination of Points and Line Segments

Most approaches to stereo visual odometry reconstruct the motion based on the tracking of point features along a sequence of images. However, in low-textured scenes it is often difficult to encounter a large set of point features, or it may happen that they are not well distributed over the image, so that the behavior of these algorithms deteriorates. This paper proposes a probabilistic approach to stereo visual odometry based on the combination of both point and line segment that works robustly in a wide variety of scenarios. The camera motion is recovered through non-linear minimization of the projection errors of both point and line segment features. In order to effectively combine both types of features, their associated errors are weighted according to their covariance matrices, computed from the propagation of Gaussian distribution errors in the sensor measurements. The method, of course, is computationally more expensive that using only one type of feature, but still can run in real-time on a standard computer and provides interesting advantages, including a straightforward integration into any probabilistic framework commonly employed in mobile robotics.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech. Project "PROMOVE: Advances in mobile robotics for promoting independent life of elders", funded by the Spanish Government and the "European Regional Development Fund ERDF" under contract DPI2014-55826-R

Planar Odometry from a Radial Laser Scanner. A Range Flow-based Approach

In this paper we present a fast and precise method to estimate the planar motion of a lidar from consecutive range scans. For every scanned point we formulate the range flow constraint equation in terms of the sensor velocity, and minimize a robust function of the resulting geometric constraints to obtain the motion estimate. Conversely to traditional approaches, this method does not search for correspondences but performs dense scan alignment based on the scan gradients, in the fashion of dense 3D visual odometry. The minimization problem is solved in a coarse-to-fine scheme to cope with large displacements, and a smooth filter based on the covariance of the estimate is employed to handle uncertainty in unconstraint scenarios (e.g. corridors). Simulated and real experiments have been performed to compare our approach with two prominent scan matchers and with wheel odometry. Quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate the superior performance of our approach which, along with its very low computational cost (0.9 milliseconds on a single CPU core), makes it suitable for those robotic applications that require planar odometry. For this purpose, we also provide the code so that the robotics community can benefit from it.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech. Spanish Government under project DPI2014-55826-R and the grant program FPI-MICINN 2012

Geometric-based Line Segment Tracking for HDR Stereo Sequences

In this work, we propose a purely geometrical approach for the robust matching of line segments for challenging stereo streams with severe illumination changes or High Dynamic Range (HDR) environments. To that purpose, we exploit the univocal nature of the matching problem, i.e. every observation must be corresponded with a single feature or not corresponded at all. We state the problem as a sparse, convex, `1-minimization of the matching vector regularized by the geometric constraints. This formulation allows for the robust tracking of line segments along sequences where traditional appearance-based matching techniques tend to fail due to dynamic changes in illumination conditions. Moreover, the proposed matching algorithm also results in a considerable speed-up of previous state of the art techniques making it suitable for real-time applications such as Visual Odometry (VO). This, of course, comes at expense of a slightly lower number of matches in comparison with appearance based methods, and also limits its application to continuous video sequences, as it is rather constrained to small pose increments between consecutive frames.We validate the claimed advantages by first evaluating the matching performance in challenging video sequences, and then testing the method in a benchmarked point and line based VO algorithm.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech.This work has been supported by the Spanish Government (project DPI2017-84827-R and grant BES-2015-071606) and by the Andalucian Government (project TEP2012-530)

Probabilistic localization of gas emission areas with a mobile robot in indoor environments

This work deals with the problem of gas source localization by a mobile robot with gas-sensing capabilities. Particularly, we address the problem for the case of indoor environments, where the presence of obstacles and the possibly complex structure with multiple rooms, inlets and outlets provoke the chaotic dispersion of the gases. Under these challenging conditions, where traditional approaches based on tracking or mathematical modeling of the plume cannot be applied, we propose a two-stage methodology to split the search into coarse and fine localization. Focusing on the broad localization, we contribute with a novel approach to estimate, from a set of sparse observations, the likelihood of different regions in the environment to hold a gas source. Experiments demonstrate that our approach is suitable to locate gas emission sources.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech