95 research outputs found
Robust Intrinsic and Extrinsic Calibration of RGB-D Cameras
Color-depth cameras (RGB-D cameras) have become the primary sensors in most
robotics systems, from service robotics to industrial robotics applications.
Typical consumer-grade RGB-D cameras are provided with a coarse intrinsic and
extrinsic calibration that generally does not meet the accuracy requirements
needed by many robotics applications (e.g., highly accurate 3D environment
reconstruction and mapping, high precision object recognition and localization,
...). In this paper, we propose a human-friendly, reliable and accurate
calibration framework that enables to easily estimate both the intrinsic and
extrinsic parameters of a general color-depth sensor couple. Our approach is
based on a novel two components error model. This model unifies the error
sources of RGB-D pairs based on different technologies, such as
structured-light 3D cameras and time-of-flight cameras. Our method provides
some important advantages compared to other state-of-the-art systems: it is
general (i.e., well suited for different types of sensors), based on an easy
and stable calibration protocol, provides a greater calibration accuracy, and
has been implemented within the ROS robotics framework. We report detailed
experimental validations and performance comparisons to support our statements
Effective Target Aware Visual Navigation for UAVs
In this paper we propose an effective vision-based navigation method that
allows a multirotor vehicle to simultaneously reach a desired goal pose in the
environment while constantly facing a target object or landmark. Standard
techniques such as Position-Based Visual Servoing (PBVS) and Image-Based Visual
Servoing (IBVS) in some cases (e.g., while the multirotor is performing fast
maneuvers) do not allow to constantly maintain the line of sight with a target
of interest. Instead, we compute the optimal trajectory by solving a non-linear
optimization problem that minimizes the target re-projection error while
meeting the UAV's dynamic constraints. The desired trajectory is then tracked
by means of a real-time Non-linear Model Predictive Controller (NMPC): this
implicitly allows the multirotor to satisfy both the required constraints. We
successfully evaluate the proposed approach in many real and simulated
experiments, making an exhaustive comparison with a standard approach.Comment: Conference paper at "European Conference on Mobile Robotics" (ECMR)
201
Automatic Model Based Dataset Generation for Fast and Accurate Crop and Weeds Detection
Selective weeding is one of the key challenges in the field of agriculture
robotics. To accomplish this task, a farm robot should be able to accurately
detect plants and to distinguish them between crop and weeds. Most of the
promising state-of-the-art approaches make use of appearance-based models
trained on large annotated datasets. Unfortunately, creating large agricultural
datasets with pixel-level annotations is an extremely time consuming task,
actually penalizing the usage of data-driven techniques. In this paper, we face
this problem by proposing a novel and effective approach that aims to
dramatically minimize the human intervention needed to train the detection and
classification algorithms. The idea is to procedurally generate large synthetic
training datasets randomizing the key features of the target environment (i.e.,
crop and weed species, type of soil, light conditions). More specifically, by
tuning these model parameters, and exploiting a few real-world textures, it is
possible to render a large amount of realistic views of an artificial
agricultural scenario with no effort. The generated data can be directly used
to train the model or to supplement real-world images. We validate the proposed
methodology by using as testbed a modern deep learning based image segmentation
architecture. We compare the classification results obtained using both real
and synthetic images as training data. The reported results confirm the
effectiveness and the potentiality of our approach.Comment: To appear in IEEE/RSJ IROS 201
KVN: Keypoints Voting Network with Differentiable RANSAC for Stereo Pose Estimation
Object pose estimation is a fundamental computer vision task exploited in
several robotics and augmented reality applications. Many established
approaches rely on predicting 2D-3D keypoint correspondences using RANSAC
(Random sample consensus) and estimating the object pose using the PnP
(Perspective-n-Point) algorithm. Being RANSAC non-differentiable,
correspondences cannot be directly learned in an end-to-end fashion. In this
paper, we address the stereo image-based object pose estimation problem by (i)
introducing a differentiable RANSAC layer into a well-known monocular pose
estimation network; (ii) exploiting an uncertainty-driven multi-view PnP solver
which can fuse information from multiple views. We evaluate our approach on a
challenging public stereo object pose estimation dataset, yielding
state-of-the-art results against other recent approaches. Furthermore, in our
ablation study, we show that the differentiable RANSAC layer plays a
significant role in the accuracy of the proposed method. We release with this
paper the open-source implementation of our method.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Robotics and Automation Letter
Plane extraction for indoor place recognition
In this paper, we present an image based plane extraction
method well suited for real-time operations. Our approach exploits the
assumption that the surrounding scene is mainly composed by planes
disposed in known directions. Planes are detected from a single image
exploiting a voting scheme that takes into account the vanishing lines.
Then, candidate planes are validated and merged using a region grow-
ing based approach to detect in real-time planes inside an unknown in-
door environment. Using the related plane homographies is possible to
remove the perspective distortion, enabling standard place recognition
algorithms to work in an invariant point of view setup. Quantitative Ex-
periments performed with real world images show the effectiveness of our
approach compared with a very popular method
An Effective Multi-Cue Positioning System for Agricultural Robotics
The self-localization capability is a crucial component for Unmanned Ground
Vehicles (UGV) in farming applications. Approaches based solely on visual cues
or on low-cost GPS are easily prone to fail in such scenarios. In this paper,
we present a robust and accurate 3D global pose estimation framework, designed
to take full advantage of heterogeneous sensory data. By modeling the pose
estimation problem as a pose graph optimization, our approach simultaneously
mitigates the cumulative drift introduced by motion estimation systems (wheel
odometry, visual odometry, ...), and the noise introduced by raw GPS readings.
Along with a suitable motion model, our system also integrates two additional
types of constraints: (i) a Digital Elevation Model and (ii) a Markov Random
Field assumption. We demonstrate how using these additional cues substantially
reduces the error along the altitude axis and, moreover, how this benefit
spreads to the other components of the state. We report exhaustive experiments
combining several sensor setups, showing accuracy improvements ranging from 37%
to 76% with respect to the exclusive use of a GPS sensor. We show that our
approach provides accurate results even if the GPS unexpectedly changes
positioning mode. The code of our system along with the acquired datasets are
released with this paper.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters,
201
Non-Linear Model Predictive Control with Adaptive Time-Mesh Refinement
In this paper, we present a novel solution for real-time, Non-Linear Model
Predictive Control (NMPC) exploiting a time-mesh refinement strategy. The
proposed controller formulates the Optimal Control Problem (OCP) in terms of
flat outputs over an adaptive lattice. In common approximated OCP solutions,
the number of discretization points composing the lattice represents a critical
upper bound for real-time applications. The proposed NMPC-based technique
refines the initially uniform time horizon by adding time steps with a sampling
criterion that aims to reduce the discretization error. This enables a higher
accuracy in the initial part of the receding horizon, which is more relevant to
NMPC, while keeping bounded the number of discretization points. By combining
this feature with an efficient Least Square formulation, our solver is also
extremely time-efficient, generating trajectories of multiple seconds within
only a few milliseconds. The performance of the proposed approach has been
validated in a high fidelity simulation environment, by using an UAV platform.
We also released our implementation as open source C++ code.Comment: In: 2018 IEEE International Conference on Simulation, Modeling, and
Programming for Autonomous Robots (SIMPAR 2018
People Tracking in Panoramic Video for Guiding Robots
A guiding robot aims to effectively bring people to and from specific places
within environments that are possibly unknown to them. During this operation
the robot should be able to detect and track the accompanied person, trying
never to lose sight of her/him. A solution to minimize this event is to use an
omnidirectional camera: its 360{\deg} Field of View (FoV) guarantees that any
framed object cannot leave the FoV if not occluded or very far from the sensor.
However, the acquired panoramic videos introduce new challenges in perception
tasks such as people detection and tracking, including the large size of the
images to be processed, the distortion effects introduced by the cylindrical
projection and the periodic nature of panoramic images. In this paper, we
propose a set of targeted methods that allow to effectively adapt to panoramic
videos a standard people detection and tracking pipeline originally designed
for perspective cameras. Our methods have been implemented and tested inside a
deep learning-based people detection and tracking framework with a commercial
360{\deg} camera. Experiments performed on datasets specifically acquired for
guiding robot applications and on a real service robot show the effectiveness
of the proposed approach over other state-of-the-art systems. We release with
this paper the acquired and annotated datasets and the open-source
implementation of our method.Comment: Accepted to 17th International Conference on Intelligent Autonomous
Systems (IAS-17
AgriColMap: Aerial-Ground Collaborative 3D Mapping for Precision Farming
The combination of aerial survey capabilities of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
with targeted intervention abilities of agricultural Unmanned Ground Vehicles
can significantly improve the effectiveness of robotic systems applied to
precision agriculture. In this context, building and updating a common map of
the field is an essential but challenging task. The maps built using robots of
different types show differences in size, resolution and scale, the associated
geolocation data may be inaccurate and biased, while the repetitiveness of both
visual appearance and geometric structures found within agricultural contexts
render classical map merging techniques ineffective. In this paper we propose
AgriColMap, a novel map registration pipeline that leverages a grid-based
multimodal environment representation which includes a vegetation index map and
a Digital Surface Model. We cast the data association problem between maps
built from UAVs and UGVs as a multimodal, large displacement dense optical flow
estimation. The dominant, coherent flows, selected using a voting scheme, are
used as point-to-point correspondences to infer a preliminary non-rigid
alignment between the maps. A final refinement is then performed, by exploiting
only meaningful parts of the registered maps. We evaluate our system using real
world data for 3 fields with different crop species. The results show that our
method outperforms several state of the art map registration and matching
techniques by a large margin, and has a higher tolerance to large initial
misalignments. We release an implementation of the proposed approach along with
the acquired datasets with this paper.Comment: Published in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 201
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