85 research outputs found
An adaptive appearance-based map for long-term topological localization of mobile robots
This work considers a mobile service robot which uses an appearance-based representation of its workplace as a map, where the current view and the map are used to estimate the current position in the environment. Due to the nature of real-world environments such as houses and offices, where the appearance keeps changing, the internal representation may become out of date after some time. To solve this problem the robot needs to be able to adapt its internal representation continually to the changes in the environment. This paper presents a method for creating an adaptive map for long-term appearance-based localization of a mobile robot using long-term and short-term memory concepts, with omni-directional vision as the external sensor
An adaptive spherical view representation for navigation in changing environments
Real-world environments such as houses and offices change over time, meaning that a mobile robot’s map will become out of date. In previous work we introduced a method to update the reference views in a topological map so that a mobile robot could continue to localize itself in a changing environment using omni-directional vision. In this work we extend this longterm updating mechanism to incorporate a spherical metric representation of the observed visual features for each node in the topological map. Using multi-view geometry we are then able to estimate the heading of the robot, in order to enable navigation between the nodes of the map, and to simultaneously adapt the spherical view representation in response to environmental changes. The results demonstrate the persistent performance of the proposed system in a long-term experiment
Toward an object-based semantic memory for long-term operation of mobile service robots
Throughout a lifetime of operation, a mobile service robot needs to acquire, store and update its knowledge of a working environment. This includes the ability to identify and track objects in different places, as well as using this information for interaction with humans. This paper introduces a long-term updating mechanism, inspired by the modal model of human memory, to enable a mobile robot to maintain its knowledge of a changing environment. The memory model is integrated with a hybrid map that represents the global topology and local geometry of the environment, as well as the respective 3D location of objects. We aim to enable the robot to use this knowledge to help humans by suggesting the most likely locations of specific objects in its map. An experiment using omni-directional vision demonstrates the ability to track the movements of several objects in a dynamic environment over an extended period of time
Did You Miss the Sign? A False Negative Alarm System for Traffic Sign Detectors
Object detection is an integral part of an autonomous vehicle for its
safety-critical and navigational purposes. Traffic signs as objects play a
vital role in guiding such systems. However, if the vehicle fails to locate any
critical sign, it might make a catastrophic failure. In this paper, we propose
an approach to identify traffic signs that have been mistakenly discarded by
the object detector. The proposed method raises an alarm when it discovers a
failure by the object detector to detect a traffic sign. This approach can be
useful to evaluate the performance of the detector during the deployment phase.
We trained a single shot multi-box object detector to detect traffic signs and
used its internal features to train a separate false negative detector (FND).
During deployment, FND decides whether the traffic sign detector (TSD) has
missed a sign or not. We are using precision and recall to measure the accuracy
of FND in two different datasets. For 80% recall, FND has achieved 89.9%
precision in Belgium Traffic Sign Detection dataset and 90.8% precision in
German Traffic Sign Recognition Benchmark dataset respectively. To the best of
our knowledge, our method is the first to tackle this critical aspect of false
negative detection in robotic vision. Such a fail-safe mechanism for object
detection can improve the engagement of robotic vision systems in our daily
life.Comment: Submitted to the 2019 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on
Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2019
Evaluating Merging Strategies for Sampling-based Uncertainty Techniques in Object Detection
There has been a recent emergence of sampling-based techniques for estimating
epistemic uncertainty in deep neural networks. While these methods can be
applied to classification or semantic segmentation tasks by simply averaging
samples, this is not the case for object detection, where detection sample
bounding boxes must be accurately associated and merged. A weak merging
strategy can significantly degrade the performance of the detector and yield an
unreliable uncertainty measure. This paper provides the first in-depth
investigation of the effect of different association and merging strategies. We
compare different combinations of three spatial and two semantic affinity
measures with four clustering methods for MC Dropout with a Single Shot
Multi-Box Detector. Our results show that the correct choice of
affinity-clustering combination can greatly improve the effectiveness of the
classification and spatial uncertainty estimation and the resulting object
detection performance. We base our evaluation on a new mix of datasets that
emulate near open-set conditions (semantically similar unknown classes),
distant open-set conditions (semantically dissimilar unknown classes) and the
common closed-set conditions (only known classes).Comment: to appear in IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
2019 (ICRA 2019
Dropout Sampling for Robust Object Detection in Open-Set Conditions
Dropout Variational Inference, or Dropout Sampling, has been recently
proposed as an approximation technique for Bayesian Deep Learning and evaluated
for image classification and regression tasks. This paper investigates the
utility of Dropout Sampling for object detection for the first time. We
demonstrate how label uncertainty can be extracted from a state-of-the-art
object detection system via Dropout Sampling. We evaluate this approach on a
large synthetic dataset of 30,000 images, and a real-world dataset captured by
a mobile robot in a versatile campus environment. We show that this uncertainty
can be utilized to increase object detection performance under the open-set
conditions that are typically encountered in robotic vision. A Dropout Sampling
network is shown to achieve a 12.3% increase in recall (for the same precision
score as a standard network) and a 15.1% increase in precision (for the same
recall score as the standard network).Comment: to appear in IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
2018 (ICRA 2018
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
A Rapidly Deployable Classification System using Visual Data for the Application of Precision Weed Management
In this work we demonstrate a rapidly deployable weed classification system
that uses visual data to enable autonomous precision weeding without making
prior assumptions about which weed species are present in a given field.
Previous work in this area relies on having prior knowledge of the weed species
present in the field. This assumption cannot always hold true for every field,
and thus limits the use of weed classification systems based on this
assumption. In this work, we obviate this assumption and introduce a rapidly
deployable approach able to operate on any field without any weed species
assumptions prior to deployment. We present a three stage pipeline for the
implementation of our weed classification system consisting of initial field
surveillance, offline processing and selective labelling, and automated
precision weeding. The key characteristic of our approach is the combination of
plant clustering and selective labelling which is what enables our system to
operate without prior weed species knowledge. Testing using field data we are
able to label 12.3 times fewer images than traditional full labelling whilst
reducing classification accuracy by only 14%.Comment: 36 pages, 14 figures, published Computers and Electronics in
Agriculture Vol. 14
Wasserstein Distance-based Expansion of Low-Density Latent Regions for Unknown Class Detection
This paper addresses the significant challenge in open-set object detection
(OSOD): the tendency of state-of-the-art detectors to erroneously classify
unknown objects as known categories with high confidence. We present a novel
approach that effectively identifies unknown objects by distinguishing between
high and low-density regions in latent space. Our method builds upon the
Open-Det (OD) framework, introducing two new elements to the loss function.
These elements enhance the known embedding space's clustering and expand the
unknown space's low-density regions. The first addition is the Class
Wasserstein Anchor (CWA), a new function that refines the classification
boundaries. The second is a spectral normalisation step, improving the
robustness of the model. Together, these augmentations to the existing
Contrastive Feature Learner (CFL) and Unknown Probability Learner (UPL) loss
functions significantly improve OSOD performance. Our proposed OpenDet-CWA
(OD-CWA) method demonstrates: a) a reduction in open-set errors by
approximately 17%-22%, b) an enhancement in novelty detection capability by
1.5%-16%, and c) a decrease in the wilderness index by 2%-20% across various
open-set scenarios. These results represent a substantial advancement in the
field, showcasing the potential of our approach in managing the complexities of
open-set object detection.Comment: 8 Full length pages, followed by 2 supplementary pages, total of 9
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