{"title":"Employing Android devices for autonomous control of a UGV","authors":"Russell J. Harding, M. Whitty","doi":"10.1109/ECMR.2015.7324200","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ECMR.2015.7324200","url":null,"abstract":"The current availability of increasingly powerful mobile devices is driving a race to integrate such technology with a diversity of new fields. In order to explore one such largely unexplored application, this paper presents an onboard mobile device-based system for autonomous control of a UGV. Contextualised by the requirements of the Australian AGVC competition, a multi-application software suite was developed for Android, implementing a number of open-source software libraries adapted for a control system application. The developed system is capable of full soft-real time autonomous control, capitalising exclusively on the Android device's embedded sensors for data acquisition. Preliminary results indicated robust capability to perceive, map and plan paths around obstacles, and perform adequately accurate localisation in real time. The effectiveness of the system, considering minimum computational power and hardware cost, not only serves as a proof of application to drive research for the next generations of mobile devices, but garnered considerable interest in competition against classical autonomous system setups.","PeriodicalId":142754,"journal":{"name":"2015 European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR)","volume":"53 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-11-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127931580","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
R. Capobianco, Jacopo Serafin, Johann Dichtl, G. Grisetti, L. Iocchi, D. Nardi
{"title":"A proposal for semantic map representation and evaluation","authors":"R. Capobianco, Jacopo Serafin, Johann Dichtl, G. Grisetti, L. Iocchi, D. Nardi","doi":"10.1109/ECMR.2015.7324198","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ECMR.2015.7324198","url":null,"abstract":"Semantic mapping is the incremental process of “mapping” relevant information of the world (i.e., spatial information, temporal events, agents and actions) to a formal description supported by a reasoning engine. Current research focuses on learning the semantic of environments based on their spatial location, geometry and appearance. Many methods to tackle this problem have been proposed, but the lack of a uniform representation, as well as standard benchmarking suites, prevents their direct comparison. In this paper, we propose a standardization in the representation of semantic maps, by defining an easily extensible formalism to be used on top of metric maps of the environments. Based on this, we describe the procedure to build a dataset (based on real sensor data) for benchmarking semantic mapping techniques, also hypothesizing some possible evaluation metrics. Nevertheless, by providing a tool for the construction of a semantic map ground truth, we aim at the contribution of the scientific community in acquiring data for populating the dataset.","PeriodicalId":142754,"journal":{"name":"2015 European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR)","volume":"124 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-11-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122896945","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Show me your moves! Conveying navigation intention of a mobile robot to humans","authors":"Alyxander David May, C. Dondrup, Marc Hanheide","doi":"10.1109/ECMR.2015.7324049","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ECMR.2015.7324049","url":null,"abstract":"When humans and mobile robots share the same space, one of their challenges is to navigate around each other and manage their mutual navigational intents. While humans have developed excellent skills in inferring their counterpart's intentions via a number of implicit and non-verbal cues, making navigation also in crowds an ease, this kind of effective and efficient communication often falls short in human-robot encounters. In this paper, two alternative approaches to convey navigational intent of a mobile robot to humans in a shared environment are proposed and analysed. The first is utilising anthropomorphic features of the mobile robot to realise an implicit joint attention using gaze to represent the direction of navigational intent. In the second approach, a more technical design adopting the semantics of car's turn indicators, has been implemented. The paper compares both approaches with each other and against a control behaviour without any communication of intent. Both approaches show statistically significant differences in comparison to the control behaviour. However, the second approach using indicators has shown as being more effective in conveying the intent and also has a higher positive impact on the comfort of the humans encountering the robot.","PeriodicalId":142754,"journal":{"name":"2015 European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR)","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-11-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123938452","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Christoph Manss, D. Shutin, Alberto Viseras Ruiz, T. Wiedemann, Joachim Müller
{"title":"Exploration under sparsity constraints","authors":"Christoph Manss, D. Shutin, Alberto Viseras Ruiz, T. Wiedemann, Joachim Müller","doi":"10.1109/ECMR.2015.7324173","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ECMR.2015.7324173","url":null,"abstract":"This paper addresses the problem of designing an efficient exploration strategy for multiple mobile agents. As an exploration strategy, an intelligent waypoint generation is considered, where the trajectory of the agent is governed by the properties of the explored phenomenon. Here it is assumed that the explored field is sparse in it's spatial distribution; consequently, it is assumed that a certain agent's movement trajectory might favor a sparse solution, as contrasted to simple sampling strategies. Specifically, these trajectories lead to an emergence of a structured sensing matrix consisting of shifted sensor impulse responses. Nevertheless some properties of this matrix, such as low mutual coherence, are essential for a successful sparse reconstruction of the phenomenon. Thus, the agents are directed to move so as to favor the desired properties of the sensing matrix, an approach termed sparse exploration. Unfortunately, numerical techniques for optimization of the sensing matrix are intractable. Therefore this paper proposes a number of heuristics, which numerically optimize the measurement locations of the agents so as to favor a sparse solution. Synthetic experiments are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed heuristics as compared to simple random walk or regular movement patterns.","PeriodicalId":142754,"journal":{"name":"2015 European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR)","volume":"72 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-11-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128019532","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Robot plans execution for information gathering tasks with resources constraints","authors":"Minlue Wang, R. Dearden, Nick Hawes","doi":"10.1109/ECMR.2015.7324216","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ECMR.2015.7324216","url":null,"abstract":"Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) have been widely used to model real world problems because of their abilities to capture uncertainty in states, actions and observations. In robotics, there are also constraints imposed on the problems, such as time constraints or resources constraints for executing actions. In this work, we seek to address the problems of planning in the presence of both uncertainty and constraints. Constrained POMDPs extend the general POMDPs by explicitly representing constraints in the goal conditions. The method we take in this paper is to use a translation-based approach to generate an MDP policy off-line, and apply value of information calculation on-line to stochastically select the observation action by taking into account of information they gain and their resource usage. This on-line selection scheme was evaluated in a number of scenarios and simulations, and the preliminary results show that our approach can achieve better performance compared to deterministic schemes.","PeriodicalId":142754,"journal":{"name":"2015 European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR)","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-11-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133896143","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
J. Lächele, J. Venrooij, P. Pretto, A. Zell, H. Bülthoff
{"title":"Novel approach for calculating motion feedback in teleoperation","authors":"J. Lächele, J. Venrooij, P. Pretto, A. Zell, H. Bülthoff","doi":"10.1109/ECMR.2015.7324186","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ECMR.2015.7324186","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper we present a method for calculating inertial motion feedback in a teleoperation setup. For this we make a distinction between vehicle-state feedback that depends on the physical motion of the remote vehicle, and task-related motion feedback that provides information about the teleoperation task. By providing motion feedback that is independent of vehicle motion we exploit the spatial decoupling between the operator and the controlled vehicle.","PeriodicalId":142754,"journal":{"name":"2015 European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR)","volume":"70 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-11-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134498989","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Where am I? An NDT-based prior for MCL","authors":"T. Kucner, Martin Magnusson, A. Lilienthal","doi":"10.1109/ECMR.2015.7324175","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ECMR.2015.7324175","url":null,"abstract":"One of the key requirements of autonomous mobile robots is a robust and accurate localisation system. Recent advances in the development of Monte Carlo Localisation (MCL) algorithms, especially the Normal Distribution Transform Monte Carlo Localisation (NDT-MCL), provides memory-efficient reliable localisation with industry-grade precision. We propose an approach for building an informed prior for NDT-MCL (in fact for any MCL algorithm) using an initial observation of the environment and its map. Leveraging on the NDT map representation, we build a set of poses using partial observations. After that we construct a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) over it. Next we obtain scores for each distribution in GMM. In this way we obtain in an efficient way a prior for NDT-MCL. Our approach provides a more focused then uniform initial distribution, concentrated in states where the robot is more likely to be, by building a Gaussian mixture model over potential poses. We present evaluations and quantitative results using real-world data from an indoor environment. Our experiments show that, compared to a uniform prior, the proposed method significantly increases the number of successful initialisations of NDT-MCL and reduces the time until convergence, at a negligible initial cost for computing the prior.","PeriodicalId":142754,"journal":{"name":"2015 European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR)","volume":"162 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-11-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133939533","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Andreas Hermann, Felix Mauch, Klaus Fischnaller, Sebastian Klemm, A. Rönnau, R. Dillmann
{"title":"Anticipate your surroundings: Predictive collision detection between dynamic obstacles and planned robot trajectories on the GPU","authors":"Andreas Hermann, Felix Mauch, Klaus Fischnaller, Sebastian Klemm, A. Rönnau, R. Dillmann","doi":"10.1109/ECMR.2015.7324047","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ECMR.2015.7324047","url":null,"abstract":"Proactive collision detection enables robots to efficiently execute tasks in shared human-robot-workspaces by avoiding collision-prone situations. Our work connects motion prediction of RGB-D flow algorithms with motion primitive planning via an efficient voxel Swept-Volume-based collision detection. The approach can handle scenarios with varying contents as we use the same techniques to predict single moving objects but also articulated bodies. Our process chain consists of highly parallel GPU algorithms that allow a full 3D representation of planned trajectories and predictions from live pointclouds in high resolution, while still being online capable. We demonstrated our achievements in two scenarios with different motion granularity.","PeriodicalId":142754,"journal":{"name":"2015 European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR)","volume":"194 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-11-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133193873","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Routing and course control of an autonomous sailboat","authors":"Hadi Saoud, Minh-Duc Hua, F. Plumet, F. B. Amar","doi":"10.1109/ECMR.2015.7324218","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ECMR.2015.7324218","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper, we present a layered control scheme for an autonomous sailboat. The high level control uses a custom cost function with a PRM-Dijkstra algorithm for the routing (global path planning) of autonomous sailboat. This algorithm exploits the sailboat kinematics and wind distribution on a map. For the low level control, we design a new nonlinear course (direction of the velocity vector) controller that exhibits superior performance compared to conventionally used heading controller. A smoothing function is also introduced in the design of the controller to switch easily from course control to heading control, especially when course measurements are noisy at low speed.","PeriodicalId":142754,"journal":{"name":"2015 European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR)","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-11-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116758385","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Model-based integration testing of ROS packages: A mobile robot case study","authors":"J. Ernits, E. Halling, Gert Kanter, J. Vain","doi":"10.1109/ECMR.2015.7324210","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ECMR.2015.7324210","url":null,"abstract":"We apply model-based testing - a black box testing technology - to improve the state of the art of integration testing of navigation and localisation software for mobile robots built in ROS. Online model-based testing involves building executable models of the requirements and executing them in parallel with the implementation under test (IUT). In the current paper we present an automated approach to generating a model from the topological map that specifies where the robot can move to. In addition, we show how to specify scenarios of interest and how to add human models to the simulated environment according to a specified scenario. We measure the quality of the tests by code coverage, and empirically show that it is possible to achieve increased test coverage by specifying simple scenarios on the automatically generated model of the topological map. The scenarios augmented by adding humans to specified rooms at specified stages of the scenario simulate the changes in the environment caused by humans. Since we test navigation at coordinate and topological level, we report on finding problems related to the topological map.","PeriodicalId":142754,"journal":{"name":"2015 European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR)","volume":"48 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-11-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123593021","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}