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This article presents a method for developing a realistic robotics simulation environment for application in vegetable greenhouses. The method pipeline starts with the construction of a 3D cloud images of the greenhouse rows. This data is then used to develop a robotics simulation environment using the CoppeliaSim simulation software. The method has been tested using images from a commercial greenhouse.
Data-driven algorithms have surpassed traditional techniques in almost every aspect in robotic vision problems. Such algorithms need vast amounts of quality data to be able to work properly after their training process. Gathering and annotating that sheer amount of data in the real world is a time-consuming and error-prone task. Those problems limit scale and quality. Synthetic data generation has become increasingly popular since it is faster to generate and automatic to annotate. However, most of the current datasets and environments lack realism, interactions, and details from the real world. UnrealROX is an environment built over Unreal Engine 4 which aims to reduce that reality gap by leveraging hyperrealistic indoor scenes that are explored by robot agents which also interact with objects in a visually realistic manner in that simulated world. Photorealistic scenes and robots are rendered by Unreal Engine into a virtual reality headset which captures gaze so that a human operator can move the robot and use controllers for the robotic hands; scene information is dumped on a per-frame basis so that it can be reproduced offline to generate raw data and ground truth annotations. This virtual reality environment enables robotic vision researchers to generate realistic and visually plausible data with full ground truth for a wide variety of problems such as class and instance semantic segmentation, object detection, depth estimation, visual grasping, and navigation.
With the rapid advance of sophisticated control algorithms, the capabilities of drones to stabilise, fly and manoeuvre autonomously have dramatically improved, enabling us to pay greater attention to entire missions and the interaction of a drone with humans and with its environment during the course of such a mission. In this paper, we present an indoor office drone assistant that is tasked to run errands and carry out simple tasks at our laboratory, while given instructions from and interacting with humans in the space. To accomplish its mission, the system has to be able to understand verbal instructions from humans, and perform subject to constraints from control and hardware limitations, uncertain localisation information, unpredictable and uncertain obstacles and environmental factors. We combine and evaluate the dialogue, navigation, flight control, depth perception and collision avoidance components. We discuss performance and limitations of our assistant at the component as well as the mission level. A 78% mission success rate was obtained over the course of 27 missions.
We study the problem of learning a generalizable action policy for an intelligent agent to actively approach an object of interest in an indoor environment solely from its visual inputs. While scene-driven or recognition-driven visual navigation has been widely studied, prior efforts suffer severely from the limited generalization capability. In this paper, we first argue the object searching task is environment dependent while the approaching ability is general. To learn a generalizable approaching policy, we present a novel solution dubbed as GAPLE which adopts two channels of visual features: depth and semantic segmentation, as the inputs to the policy learning module. The empirical studies conducted on the House3D dataset as well as on a physical platform in a real world scenario validate our hypothesis, and we further provide in-depth qualitative analysis.
As many robot automation applications increasingly rely on multi-core processing or deep-learning models, cloud computing is becoming an attractive and economically viable resource for systems that do not contain high computing power onboard. Despite its immense computing capacity, it is often underused by the robotics and automation community due to lack of expertise in cloud computing and cloud-based infrastructure. Fog Robotics balances computing and data between cloud edge devices. We propose a software framework, FogROS, as an extension of the Robot Operating System (ROS), the de-facto standard for creating robot automation applications and components. It allows researchers to deploy components of their software to the cloud with minimal effort, and correspondingly gain access to additional computing cores, GPUs, FPGAs, and TPUs, as well as predeployed software made available by other researchers. FogROS allows a researcher to specify which components of their software will be deployed to the cloud and to what type of computing hardware. We evaluate FogROS on 3 examples: (1) simultaneous localization and mapping (ORB-SLAM2), (2) Dexterity Network (Dex-Net) GPU-based grasp planning, and (3) multi-core motion planning using a 96-core cloud-based server. In all three examples, a component is deployed to the cloud and accelerated with a small change in system launch configuration, while incurring additional latency of 1.2 s, 0.6 s, and 0.5 s due to network communication, the computation speed is improved by 2.6x, 6.0x and 34.2x, respectively. Code, videos, and supplementary material can be found at https://github.com/BerkeleyAutomation/FogROS.
We present iGibson 1.0, a novel simulation environment to develop robotic solutions for interactive tasks in large-scale realistic scenes. Our environment contains 15 fully interactive home-sized scenes with 108 rooms populated with rigid and articulated objects. The scenes are replicas of real-world homes, with distribution and the layout of objects aligned to those of the real world. iGibson 1.0 integrates several key features to facilitate the study of interactive tasks: i) generation of high-quality virtual sensor signals (RGB, depth, segmentation, LiDAR, flow and so on), ii) domain randomization to change the materials of the objects (both visual and physical) and/or their shapes, iii) integrated sampling-based motion planners to generate collision-free trajectories for robot bases and arms, and iv) intuitive human-iGibson interface that enables efficient collection of human demonstrations. Through experiments, we show that the full interactivity of the scenes enables agents to learn useful visual representations that accelerate the training of downstream manipulation tasks. We also show that iGibson 1.0 features enable the generalization of navigation agents, and that the human-iGibson interface and integrated motion planners facilitate efficient imitation learning of human demonstrated (mobile) manipulation behaviors. iGibson 1.0 is open-source, equipped with comprehensive examples and documentation. For more information, visit our project website: http://svl.stanford.edu/igibson/