{"title":"Generating topologically consistent triangle meshes from large scale Kinect Fusion","authors":"Tristan Igelbrink, T. Wiemann, J. Hertzberg","doi":"10.1109/ECMR.2015.7324205","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ECMR.2015.7324205","url":null,"abstract":"Generating polygonal maps from RGB-D data is an active field of research in robotic mapping. Kinect Fusion and related algorithms provide means to generate reconstructions of large environments. However, most available implementations generate topological artifacts like redundant vertices and triangles. In this paper we present a novel data structure that allows to generate topologically consistent triangle meshes from RGB-D data without additional filtering.","PeriodicalId":142754,"journal":{"name":"2015 European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR)","volume":"7 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":"127436228","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":"Knowledge-base topological exploration for mobile robots","authors":"Karel Kosnar, Vojtěch Vonásek, L. Preucil","doi":"10.1109/ECMR.2015.7324190","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ECMR.2015.7324190","url":null,"abstract":"This paper introduces novel graph exploration based on reasoning procedure. The proposed approach does not need any markers and only a similarity measures of the places and routes are used for decisions and loop closing. The edge selection process is driven by information gain, which is computed for each edge based on the probability of the loop closure and consecutive merges performed if the loop closure take place. The edge with high probability of closing the loop and high number of edge consecutively merged and therefore eliminated from the map is preferred. A loop-closing procedure used in the exploration algorithm utilizes the information about the environment structure. A priori knowledge of the environment properties is incorporated into the reasoning procedure as logic rules. Proposed exploration algorithm were experimentally verified in simulator and with real robot in indoor environment.","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":"124477910","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":"3D planning and trajectory optimization for real-time generation of smooth MAV trajectories","authors":"Matthias Nieuwenhuisen, Sven Behnke","doi":"10.1109/ECMR.2015.7324217","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ECMR.2015.7324217","url":null,"abstract":"Complex indoor and outdoor missions for autonomous micro aerial vehicles (MAV) constitute a demand for fast generation of collision-free paths in 3D space. Often not all obstacles in an environment are known prior to the mission execution. Consequently, the ability for replanning during a flight is key for success. Our approach utilizes coarse grid-based path planning with an approximate model of flight dynamics to determine collision-free trajectories. To account for the flight dynamics and to mitigate discretization effects, these trajectories are further optimized with a gradient-based motion optimization method. We evaluate our method on an outdoor map with buildings and report trajectory costs and runtime results.","PeriodicalId":142754,"journal":{"name":"2015 European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR)","volume":"18 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":"124234631","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":"Development of a low-cost Unmanned Surface Vehicle for digital survey","authors":"A. Mancini, E. Frontoni, P. Zingaretti","doi":"10.1109/ECMR.2015.7324189","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ECMR.2015.7324189","url":null,"abstract":"During last years unmanned ground and aerial vehicles captured the attention of researchers and companies, while the available set of Unmanned Surface Vehicle platforms is smaller. In many scenarios an integrated approach is required considering a heterogeneous fleet of vehicles. In this paper we focus on the development of a low-cost unmanned surface platform for digital surveys. The boat has been designed to navigate also in shallow water owing to a low draft design. An embedded system with Robot Operating System (ROS) onboard has been deployed on the surface vehicle. One of the main advantages of the proposed solution is its reduced cost owing to open-hardware/software solutions. In particular, an open-hardware solution is responsible for the interfacing of an RTK GPS with a bathymetric ultrasound sensor to map the sea / lake / river floor. The boat can be either remotely controllable or fully autonomous. An Augmented Reality (AR) application has been also developed to show the path and the set of survey blocks that are mapped / not mapped. The AR application is particularly useful when the user remotely controls the boat, but also for supervising the autonomous survey. The performances achieved in the first trials are satisfactory and the AR application produces significant maps.","PeriodicalId":142754,"journal":{"name":"2015 European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR)","volume":"100 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":"124600044","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}
M. Karthik, Sudhanshu Mittal, G. Malik, K. Krishna
{"title":"Decision theoretic search for small objects through integrating far and near cues","authors":"M. Karthik, Sudhanshu Mittal, G. Malik, K. Krishna","doi":"10.1109/ECMR.2015.7324050","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ECMR.2015.7324050","url":null,"abstract":"In an object search scenario with several small objects spread over a large indoor environment, the robot cannot infer about all of them at once. Pruning the search space is highly desirable in such a case. It has to actively select a course of actions to closely examine a selected set of objects. Here, we model the inferences about far away objects and their viewpoint priors into a decision analytic abstraction to prioritize the waypoints. By selecting objects of interest, a potential field is built over the environment by using Composite Viewpoint Object Potential (CVOP) maps. A CVOP is built using VOP, a framework to identify discriminative viewpoints to recognize small objects having distinctive features only in specific views. Also, a CVOP helps to clearly disambiguate objects which look similar from far away. We formulate a Decision Analysis Graph (DAG) over the above information, to assist the robot in actively navigating and maximize the reward earned. This optimal strategy increases search reliability, even in the presence of similar looking small objects which induce confusion into the agent and simultaneously reduces both time taken and distance travelled. To the best of our knowledge, there is no current unified formulation which addresses indoor object search scenarios in this manner. We evaluate our system over ROS using a TurtleBot mounted with a Kinect.","PeriodicalId":142754,"journal":{"name":"2015 European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR)","volume":"236 2 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":"121091099","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}
G. Malik, Krishnam Gupta, K. Krishna, S. R. Chowdhury
{"title":"FPGA based combinatorial architecture for parallelizing RRT","authors":"G. Malik, Krishnam Gupta, K. Krishna, S. R. Chowdhury","doi":"10.1109/ECMR.2015.7324211","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ECMR.2015.7324211","url":null,"abstract":"Complex tasks are often handled through software implementation in combination with high performance processors. Taking advantage of hardware parallelism, FPGA is breaking the paradigm by accomplishing more per clock cycle with closely matched application requirements. With the aim to minimise computation delay with increase in map's size and geometric constraints, we present the FPGA based combinatorial architecture that allows multiple RRTs to work together to achieve accelerated, uniform exploration of the map. We also analyse our architecture against hardware implementation of other scalable RRT methods for motion planning. We observe notable furtherance of acceleration capabilities with the proposed architecture delivering a minimum 3X gain over the other implementations while maintaining uniformity in exploration.","PeriodicalId":142754,"journal":{"name":"2015 European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR)","volume":"35 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":"122464676","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}
Marina Kollmitz, Kaijen Hsiao, J. Gaa, Wolfram Burgard
{"title":"Time dependent planning on a layered social cost map for human-aware robot navigation","authors":"Marina Kollmitz, Kaijen Hsiao, J. Gaa, Wolfram Burgard","doi":"10.1109/ECMR.2015.7324184","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ECMR.2015.7324184","url":null,"abstract":"As robots make their way into our everyday lives, new behavioral concepts are needed to assure their acceptance as interaction partners. In the presence of humans, robots are required to take safety as well as human comfort into account. This paper presents a novel, planning-based approach for social robot navigation. It uses predicted human trajectories and a social cost function to plan collision-free paths that take human comfort into account. It furthermore employs time dependent, kinodynamic path planning to reason about human motion over time and to account for the kinematic and dynamic constraints of a robot. Our approach generates paths that exhibit properties similar to those used in human-human interaction, such as waiting for a human to pass before continuing along an intended path, avoiding getting too close to another human's personal space, and moving out of the way when blocking a human's path. In extensive experiments carried out with real robots and in simulation we demonstrate the performance of our approach.","PeriodicalId":142754,"journal":{"name":"2015 European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR)","volume":"16 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":"116722102","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":"An evaluation of robust cost functions for RGB direct mapping","authors":"Alejo Concha, Javier Civera","doi":"10.1109/ECMR.2015.7324174","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ECMR.2015.7324174","url":null,"abstract":"The so-called direct SLAM methods have shown an impressive performance in estimating a dense 3D reconstruction from RGB sequences in real-time [1], [2], [3]. They are based on the minimization of an error function composed of several terms that account for the photometric consistency of corresponding pixels and the smoothness and the planarity priors on the reconstructed surfaces. In this paper we evaluate several robust error functions that reduce the influence of large individual contributions -that most likely correspond to outliers- to the total error. Our experimental results show that the differences between the robust functions are considerable, the best of them reducing the estimation error up to 25%.","PeriodicalId":142754,"journal":{"name":"2015 European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR)","volume":"12 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":"116934339","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":"An integrated control framework for long-term autonomy in mobile service robots","authors":"Lenka Mudrová, Bruno Lacerda, Nick Hawes","doi":"10.1109/ECMR.2015.7324192","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ECMR.2015.7324192","url":null,"abstract":"This paper describes an integrated framework for the long-term task-driven control of mobile service robots. The core components of the framework are: a high-level task executor that manages execution, for example by reacting to failures, or adding extra tasks required by the end-user on-the-fly; a task scheduler that schedules sets of tasks throughout the day, taking into account travel times between locations and task durations, while satisfying the time constraints associated with each task; and a probabilistic topological motion planner that provides time-dependent optimal navigation policies and expected navigation times between task locations. We illustrate the overall framework by reporting on a three-week deployment in a real-world office environment, and use the data collected during the deployment to validate and illustrate the capabilities of the framework to adapt itself to the different travel time expectations throughout the day.","PeriodicalId":142754,"journal":{"name":"2015 European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR)","volume":"27 7 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":"114148315","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":"Visual road following using intrinsic images","authors":"T. Krajník, J. Blazicek, J. M. Santos","doi":"10.1109/ECMR.2015.7324212","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ECMR.2015.7324212","url":null,"abstract":"We present a real-time visual-based road following method for mobile robots in outdoor environments. The approach combines an image processing method, that allows to retrieve illumination invariant images, with an efficient path following algorithm. The method allows a mobile robot to autonomously navigate along pathways of different types in adverse lighting conditions using monocular vision. To validate the proposed method, we have evaluated its ability to correctly determine boundaries of pathways in a challenging outdoor dataset. Moreover, the method's performance was tested on a mobile robotic platform that autonomously navigated long paths in urban parks. The experiments demonstrated that the mobile robot was able to identify outdoor pathways of different types and navigate through them despite the presence of shadows that significantly influenced the paths' appearance.","PeriodicalId":142754,"journal":{"name":"2015 European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR)","volume":"13 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":"129773453","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}