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Register a new userDepth estimation on embedded computers for robot swarms in forest
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Added by
Chaoyue Niu
Publication date
2020
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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Robot swarms to date are not prepared for autonomous navigation such as path planning and obstacle detection in forest floor, unable to achieve low-cost. The development of depth sensing and embedded computing hardware paves the way for swarm of terrestrial robots. The goal of this research is to improve this situation by developing low cost vision system for small ground robots to rapidly perceive terrain. We develop two depth estimation models and evaluate their performance on Raspberry Pi 4 and Jetson Nano in terms of accuracy, runtime and model size of depth estimation models, as well as memory consumption, power draw, temperature, and cost of above two embedded on-board computers. Our research demonstrated that auto-encoder network deployed on Raspberry Pi 4 runs at a power consumption of 3.4 W, memory consumption of about 200 MB, and mean runtime of 13 ms. This can be to meet our requirement for low-cost swarm of robots. Moreover, our analysis also indicated multi-scale deep network performs better for predicting depth map from blurred RGB images caused by camera motion. This paper mainly describes depth estimation models trained on our own dataset recorded in forest, and their performance on embedded on-board computers.
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Rapid progress in embedded computing hardware increasingly enables on-board image processing on small robots. This development opens the path to replacing costly sensors with sophisticated computer vision techniques. A case in point is the prediction of scene depth information from a monocular camera for autonomous navigation. Motivated by the aim to develop a robot swarm suitable for sensing, monitoring, and search applications in forests, we have collected a set of RGB images and corresponding depth maps. Over 100k images were recorded with a custom rig from the perspective of a small ground rover moving through a forest. Taken under different weather and lighting conditions, the images include scenes with grass, bushes, standing and fallen trees, tree branches, leafs, and dirt. In addition GPS, IMU, and wheel encoder data was recorded. From the calibrated, synchronized, aligned and timestamped frames about 9700 image-depth map pairs were selected for sharpness and variety. We provide this dataset to the community to fill a need identified in our own research and hope it will accelerate progress in robots navigating the challenging forest environment. This paper describes our custom hardware and methodology to collect the data, subsequent processing and quality of the data, and how to access it.
Rapid performance recovery from unforeseen environmental perturbations remains a grand challenge in swarm robotics. To solve this challenge, we investigate a behaviour adaptation approach, where one searches an archive of controllers for potential recovery solutions. To apply behaviour adaptation in swarm robotic systems, we propose two algorithms: (i) Swarm Map-based Optimisation (SMBO), which selects and evaluates one controller at a time, for a homogeneous swarm, in a centralised fashion; and (ii) Swarm Map-based Optimisation Decentralised (SMBO-Dec), which performs an asynchronous batch-based Bayesian optimisation to simultaneously explore different controllers for groups of robots in the swarm. We set up foraging experiments with a variety of disturbances: injected faults to proximity sensors, ground sensors, and the actuators of individual robots, with 100 unique combinations for each type. We also investigate disturbances in the operating environment of the swarm, where the swarm has to adapt to drastic changes in the number of resources available in the environment, and to one of the robots behaving disruptively towards the rest of the swarm, with 30 unique conditions for each such perturbation. The viability of SMBO and SMBO-Dec is demonstrated, comparing favourably to variants of random search and gradient descent, and various ablations, and improving performance up to 80% compared to the performance at the time of fault injection within at most 30 evaluations.
We present a number of powerful local mechanisms for maintaining a dynamic swarm of robots with limited capabilities and information, in the presence of external forces and permanent node failures. We propose a set of local continuous algorithms that together produce a generalization of a Euclidean Steiner tree. At any stage, the resulting overall shape achieves a good compromise between local thickness, global connectivity, and flexibility to further continuous motion of the terminals. The resulting swarm behavior scales well, is robust against node failures, and performs close to the best known approximation bound for a corresponding centralized static optimization problem.
Visual localization for planar moving robot is important to various indoor service robotic applications. To handle the textureless areas and frequent human activities in indoor environments, a novel robust visual localization algorithm which leverages dense correspondence and sparse depth for planar moving robot is proposed. The key component is a minimal solution which computes the absolute camera pose with one 3D-2D correspondence and one 2D-2D correspondence. The advantages are obvious in two aspects. First, the robustness is enhanced as the sample set for pose estimation is maximal by utilizing all correspondences with or without depth. Second, no extra effort for dense map construction is required to exploit dense correspondences for handling textureless and repetitive texture scenes. That is meaningful as building a dense map is computational expensive especially in large scale. Moreover, a probabilistic analysis among different solutions is presented and an automatic solution selection mechanism is designed to maximize the success rate by selecting appropriate solutions in different environmental characteristics. Finally, a complete visual localization pipeline considering situations from the perspective of correspondence and depth density is summarized and validated on both simulation and public real-world indoor localization dataset. The code is released on github.
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