No Arabic abstract
In this paper, we present an active visual SLAM approach for omnidirectional robots. The goal is to generate control commands that allow such a robot to simultaneously localize itself and map an unknown environment while maximizing the amount of information gained and consume as low energy as possible. Leveraging the robots independent translation and rotation control, we introduce a multi-layered approach for active V-SLAM. The top layer decides on informative goal locations and generates highly informative paths to them. The second and third layers actively re-plan and execute the path, exploiting the continuously updated map and local features information. Moreover, we introduce two utility formulations to account for the obstacle presence in the field of view and the robots location. Through rigorous simulations, real robot experiments and comparisons with the state-of-the-art methods, we demonstrate that our approach achieves similar coverage results with lesser overall map entropy. This is obtained while keeping the traversed distance up to 39% shorter than the other methods and without increasing the wheels total rotation amount. Code and implementation details are provided as opensource.
We present an active visual search model for finding objects in unknown environments. The proposed algorithm guides the robot towards the sought object using the relevant stimuli provided by the visual sensors. Existing search strategies are either purely reactive or use simplified sensor models that do not exploit all the visual information available. In this paper, we propose a new model that actively extracts visual information via visual attention techniques and, in conjunction with a non-myopic decision-making algorithm, leads the robot to search more relevant areas of the environment. The attention module couples both top-down and bottom-up attention models enabling the robot to search regions with higher importance first. The proposed algorithm is evaluated on a mobile robot platform in a 3D simulated environment. The results indicate that the use of visual attention significantly improves search, but the degree of improvement depends on the nature of the task and the complexity of the environment. In our experiments, we found that performance enhancements of up to 42% in structured and 38% in highly unstructured cluttered environments can be achieved using visual attention mechanisms.
In active Visual-SLAM (V-SLAM), a robot relies on the information retrieved by its cameras to control its own movements for autonomous mapping of the environment. Cameras are usually statically linked to the robots body, limiting the extra degrees of freedom for visual information acquisition. In this work, we overcome the aforementioned problem by introducing and leveraging an independently rotating camera on the robot base. This enables us to continuously control the heading of the camera, obtaining the desired optimal orientation for active V-SLAM, without rotating the robot itself. However, this additional degree of freedom introduces additional estimation uncertainties, which need to be accounted for. We do this by extending our robots state estimate to include the camera state and jointly estimate the uncertainties. We develop our method based on a state-of-the-art active V-SLAM approach for omnidirectional robots and evaluate it through rigorous simulation and real robot experiments. We obtain more accurate maps, with lower energy consumption, while maintaining the benefits of the active approach with respect to the baseline. We also demonstrate how our method easily generalizes to other non-omnidirectional robotic platforms, which was a limitation of the previous approach. Code and implementation details are provided as open-source.
Recently, the philosophy of visual saliency and attention has started to gain popularity in the robotics community. Therefore, this paper aims to mimic this mechanism in SLAM framework by using saliency prediction model. Comparing with traditional SLAM that treated all feature points as equal important in optimization process, we think that the salient feature points should play more important role in optimization process. Therefore, we proposed a saliency model to predict the saliency map, which can capture both scene semantic and geometric information. Then, we proposed Salient Bundle Adjustment by using the value of saliency map as the weight of the feature points in traditional Bundle Adjustment approach. Exhaustive experiments conducted with the state-of-the-art algorithm in KITTI and EuRoc datasets show that our proposed algorithm outperforms existing algorithms in both indoor and outdoor environments. Finally, we will make our saliency dataset and relevant source code open-source for enabling future research.
Monocular cameras coupled with inertial measurements generally give high performance visual inertial odometry. However, drift can be significant with long trajectories, especially when the environment is visually challenging. In this paper, we propose a system that leverages ultra-wideband ranging with one static anchor placed in the environment to correct the accumulated error whenever the anchor is visible. We also use this setup for collaborative SLAM: different robots use mutual ranging (when available) and the common anchor to estimate the transformation between each other, facilitating map fusion Our system consists of two modules: a double layer ranging, visual, and inertial odometry for single robots, and a transformation estimation module for collaborative SLAM. We test our system on public datasets by simulating an ultra-wideband sensor as well as on real robots. Experiments show our method can outperform state-of-the-art visual-inertial odometry by more than 20%. For visually challenging environments, our method works even the visual-inertial odometry has significant drift Furthermore, we can compute the collaborative SLAM transformation matrix at almost no extra computation cost.
Visual-inertial SLAM (VI-SLAM) requires a good initial estimation of the initial velocity, orientation with respect to gravity and gyroscope and accelerometer biases. In this paper we build on the initialization method proposed by Martinelli and extended by Kaiser et al. , modifying it to be more general and efficient. We improve accuracy with several rounds of visual-inertial bundle adjustment, and robustify the method with novel observability and consensus tests, that discard erroneous solutions. Our results on the EuRoC dataset show that, while the original method produces scale errors up to 156%, our method is able to consistently initialize in less than two seconds with scale errors around 5%, which can be further reduced to less than 1% performing visual-inertial bundle adjustment after ten seconds.