A. Rutherford, Paul Duckworth, N. Hawes, Bruno Lacerda
{"title":"Motion Planning in Uncertain Environments with Rapidly-Exploring Random Markov Decision Processes","authors":"A. Rutherford, Paul Duckworth, N. Hawes, Bruno Lacerda","doi":"10.1109/ecmr50962.2021.9568849","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ecmr50962.2021.9568849","url":null,"abstract":"We propose rapidly-exploring random Markov decision processes (RRMDPs), a novel sampling-based motion planning approach for situations where the environment parameters are not fully known a priori, but a prior distribution over such parameters is available. Our algorithm combines ideas from established motion planning algorithms to achieve motion policies that are able to robustly drive the robot to its goal in the presence of uncertain action outcomes. We evaluate RRMDP in two domains, showing that it can synthesise motion policies that are more robust than the motion plans obtained by particle rapidly-exploring random trees (pRRT), a widely used algorithm for motion planning under uncertainty which RRMDP builds upon.","PeriodicalId":200521,"journal":{"name":"2021 European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR)","volume":"75 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127343541","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":"Online Range Image-based Pole Extractor for Long-term LiDAR Localization in Urban Environments","authors":"Hao Dong, Xieyuanli Chen, C. Stachniss","doi":"10.1109/ECMR50962.2021.9568850","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ECMR50962.2021.9568850","url":null,"abstract":"Reliable and accurate localization is crucial for mobile autonomous systems. Pole-like objects, such as traffic signs, poles, lamps, etc., are ideal landmarks for localization in urban environments due to their local distinctiveness and long-term stability. In this paper, we present a novel, accurate, and fast pole extraction approach that runs online and has little computational demands such that this information can be used for a localization system. Our method performs all computations directly on range images generated from 3D LiDAR scans, which avoids processing 3D point cloud explicitly and enables fast pole extraction for each scan. We test the proposed pole extraction and localization approach on different datasets with different LiDAR scanners, weather conditions, routes, and seasonal changes. The experimental results show that our approach outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches, while running online without a GPU. Besides, we release our pole dataset to the public for evaluating the performance of pole extractor, as well as the implementation of our approach.","PeriodicalId":200521,"journal":{"name":"2021 European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR)","volume":"58 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121757360","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}
A. C. Hernández, M. Durner, Clara Gómez, I. Grixa, Oskars Teikmanis, Zoltán-Csaba Márton, R. Barber
{"title":"Searching for Objects in Human Living Environments based on Relevant Inferred and Mined Priors*","authors":"A. C. Hernández, M. Durner, Clara Gómez, I. Grixa, Oskars Teikmanis, Zoltán-Csaba Márton, R. Barber","doi":"10.1109/ecmr50962.2021.9568792","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ecmr50962.2021.9568792","url":null,"abstract":"Service robots performing tasks in human environments constantly face changes due to the dynamic of the environments. Such robots need to reason about their surrounding for a better understanding of it. Besides, it is important to demonstrate capabilities that potential users would find useful, thus validating the development of such systems. One of these capabilities is to help a person to find what she or he is looking for. This mundane task of searching for an object is highly relevant in showing the non-expert user that a robot can understand the world. In this paper, we propose an efficient search strategy to find target objects that have not been seen before, based on the reasoning about in which scenes and with which objects they co-occur. Our method consists of an inference process based on a Conditional Random Field (CRF), that fuses the information about other previously detected objects, the semantic floor map, and the object-object/-room relations, to build a prediction map with the most promising locations for an unseen object. To validate our work, comparative experiments in simulated environments have been performed, demonstrating the efficiency of our proposed search strategy.","PeriodicalId":200521,"journal":{"name":"2021 European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR)","volume":"80 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131279426","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}
Salman Omar Sohail, Alex Mitrevski, N. Hochgeschwender, P. Plöger
{"title":"Property-Based Testing in Simulation for Verifying Robot Action Execution in Tabletop Manipulation","authors":"Salman Omar Sohail, Alex Mitrevski, N. Hochgeschwender, P. Plöger","doi":"10.1109/ecmr50962.2021.9568837","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ecmr50962.2021.9568837","url":null,"abstract":"An important prerequisite for the reliability and robustness of a service robot is ensuring the robot’s correct behavior when it performs various tasks of interest. Extensive testing is one established approach for ensuring behavioural correctness; this becomes even more important with the integration of learning-based methods into robot software architectures, as there are often no theoretical guarantees about the performance of such methods in varying scenarios. In this paper, we aim towards evaluating the correctness of robot behaviors in tabletop manipulation through automatic generation of simulated test scenarios in which a robot assesses its performance using property-based testing. In particular, key properties of interest for various robot actions are encoded in an action ontology and are then verified and validated within a simulated environment. We evaluate our framework with a Toyota Human Support Robot (HSR) which is tested in a Gazebo simulation. We show that our framework can correctly and consistently identify various failed actions in a variety of randomised tabletop manipulation scenarios, in addition to providing deeper insights into the type and location of failures for each designed property.","PeriodicalId":200521,"journal":{"name":"2021 European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR)","volume":"39 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133862027","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}
Piotr A. Bogdan, Jonathan Wheadon, Frederico B Klein, M. Gianni
{"title":"Magnetic Tracked Robot for Internal Pipe Inspection","authors":"Piotr A. Bogdan, Jonathan Wheadon, Frederico B Klein, M. Gianni","doi":"10.1109/ecmr50962.2021.9568790","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ecmr50962.2021.9568790","url":null,"abstract":"This work presents a tracked robot for tele-operated inspection of the interior of variable size, multi-path and non-planar ferromagnetic pipe installations, addressing the traversability problem of unpiggable pipelines. Our main contribution is a novel flexible per-segment-cambering track, fitted with permanent rare-earth magnets. This track is designed to improve maneuverability over standard magnetic tracked wall climbers. Experiments show that, using these magnetic adhesive tracks, the robot can traverse inclined and vertical segments on the pipes’ inner surface, allowing navigation around complex pipe geometries including vertical climb, horizontal pipe diameter changes and sharp turns.","PeriodicalId":200521,"journal":{"name":"2021 European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR)","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134512572","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":"Completing Robot Maps by Predicting the Layout of Rooms Behind Closed Doors","authors":"M. Luperto, Federico Amadelli, F. Amigoni","doi":"10.1109/ecmr50962.2021.9568786","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ecmr50962.2021.9568786","url":null,"abstract":"The availability of maps of indoor environments is often fundamental for autonomous mobile robots to efficiently operate in industrial, office, and domestic applications. When robots build such maps, some areas of interest could be inaccessible, for instance, due to closed doors. As a consequence, these areas are not represented in the maps, possibly limiting the activities robots can perform. In this paper, we provide a method that completes 2D grid maps by adding the predicted layout of the rooms behind closed doors. The main idea of our approach is to exploit the underlying geometrical structure of indoor environments to estimate the shape of unobserved rooms. Results show that our method is accurate in completing maps also when large portions of environments cannot be accessed by the robot during map building.","PeriodicalId":200521,"journal":{"name":"2021 European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR)","volume":"38 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121869436","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":"Decentralized Topological Mapping for Multi-robot Autonomous Exploration under Low-Bandwidth Communication","authors":"J. Bayer, J. Faigl","doi":"10.1109/ecmr50962.2021.9568824","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ecmr50962.2021.9568824","url":null,"abstract":"This paper concerns a mapping framework for multi-robot exploration of underground environments with only very limited communication available. We focus on multi-robot map building and coordination to explore large areas with real-time planning to long distances. The considered communication can broadcast only 100 B/s, and therefore, we propose coordination planning using two terrain models. The first model is a dense 3D map built by each robot individually to identify explorable places and generate detailed plans to avoid un-traversable areas. The second model is a global topological map built in a decentralized manner by exchanging tiny 12 B packets between the robots. The feasibility of the proposed approach has been verified in the real-world autonomous exploration mission and various multi-robot scenarios inspired by a virtual cave circuit of the DARPA Subterranean Challenge while adapting two different decentralized coordination strategies.","PeriodicalId":200521,"journal":{"name":"2021 European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR)","volume":"73 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121117849","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":"Monocular Localization in Feature-Annotated 3D Polygon Maps","authors":"Alexander Mock, T. Wiemann, J. Hertzberg","doi":"10.1109/ecmr50962.2021.9568810","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ecmr50962.2021.9568810","url":null,"abstract":"Localization in six degrees of freedom is becoming increasingly relevant, especially in indoor environments where GPS is not available. To localize autonomous vehicles like UAVs in such areas, reliable methods for self-localization with low-weight sensors are required. In this paper, we present an approach to precisely localize systems with monocular cameras in polygonal 3D maps annotated with keypoints and feature descriptors computed from LiDAR data and associated reference images. Our contribution consists of offline map computation from high resolution 3D point clouds with corresponding reference images as well as online localization within these maps using low cost sensors. During localization, features extracted from the vehicle’s camera image stream are matched against the reference map. The proposed method is capable of real-time localization and suitable for precise global localization. The evaluation shows comparable results to state of the art with high re-localization accuracy.","PeriodicalId":200521,"journal":{"name":"2021 European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR)","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123033567","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":"NDT Localization with 2D Vector Maps and Filtered LiDAR Scans","authors":"Maxime Escourrou, Joelle Al Hage, P. Bonnifait","doi":"10.1109/ecmr50962.2021.9568809","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ecmr50962.2021.9568809","url":null,"abstract":"High accuracy localization is a basic requirement for autonomous vehicles navigation. However, in urban environments, Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) suffer from Non-Line of Sight (NLoS) signals, multipath and sometimes a limited number of visible satellites, degrading the localization accuracy. Maps with georeferenced features are a means to address this issue. In this paper, an open access map with cadastral footprints of the buildings is used for localization. Buildings are stable over time and provide visible features in cities. Using 2D footprints of the buildings provides little detailed information, but when they are matched with long range omnidirectional LiDARs, a good quality estimated pose can be achieved. We present a method that uses the Normal Distributions Transform (NDT) to match several layers of a LiDAR scan with the map. A fast filtering method based on local linear regression is proposed to extract aligned points in the LiDAR scans which filters out the largest part of the outliers before applying the NDT optimization. The performance of the approach is evaluated on real data recorded with an experimental vehicle equipped with a ground truth. The results show that this approach is able to provide high accuracy consistent with autonomous navigation tasks.","PeriodicalId":200521,"journal":{"name":"2021 European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR)","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126945288","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":"MDP-based Motion Planning for Grasping in Dynamic Scenarios","authors":"Steffen Müller, Benedict Stephan, H. Groß","doi":"10.1109/ecmr50962.2021.9568813","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ecmr50962.2021.9568813","url":null,"abstract":"Path planning for robotic manipulation is a well understood topic as long as the execution of the plan takes place in a static scene. Unfortunately, for applications involving human interaction partners a dynamic obstacle configuration has to be considered. Furthermore, if it comes to grasping objects from a human hand, there is not a single goal position and the optimal grasping configuration may change during the execution of the grasp movement. This makes a continuous re-planning in a loop necessary. Besides efficiency and security concerns, such periodic planning raises the additional requirement of consistency, which is hard to achieve with traditional sampling based planners. We present an online capable planner for continuous control of a robotic grasp task. The planner additionally is able to resolve multiple possible grasp poses and additional goal functions by applying an MDP-like optimization of future rewards. Furthermore, we present a heuristic for setting edges in a probabilistic roadmap graph that improves the connectivity and keeps edge count low.","PeriodicalId":200521,"journal":{"name":"2021 European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR)","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125342879","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}