{"title":"Escaping Local Minima in Search-Based Planning using Soft Duplicate Detection","authors":"Wei Du, Sung-Kyun Kim, Oren Salzman, M. Likhachev","doi":"10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8967815","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8967815","url":null,"abstract":"Search-based planning for relatively low-dimensional motion-planning problems such as for autonomous navigation and autonomous flight has been shown to be very successful. Such framework relies on laying a grid over a state-space and constructing a set of actions (motion primitives) that connect the centers of cells. However, in some cases such as kinodynamic motion planning, planning for bipedal robots with high balance requirements, computing these actions can be highly non-trivial and often impossible depending on the dynamic constraints. In this paper, we explore a soft version of discretization, wherein the state-space remains to be continuous but the search tries to avoid exploring states that are likely to be duplicates of states that have already been explored. We refer to this property of the search as soft duplicate detection and view it as a relaxation of the standard notion of duplicate detection. Empirically, we show that the search can efficiently compute paths in highly-constrained settings and outperforms alternatives on several domains.","PeriodicalId":428768,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)","volume":"52 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131233871","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}
Stefano Aldegheri, N. Bombieri, D. Bloisi, A. Farinelli
{"title":"Data Flow ORB-SLAM for Real-time Performance on Embedded GPU Boards","authors":"Stefano Aldegheri, N. Bombieri, D. Bloisi, A. Farinelli","doi":"10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8967814","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8967814","url":null,"abstract":"The use of embedded boards on robots, including unmanned aerial and ground vehicles, is increasing thanks to the availability of GPU equipped low-cost embedded boards in the market. Porting algorithms originally designed for desktop CPUs on those boards is not straightforward due to hardware limitations. In this paper, we present how we modified and customized the open source SLAM algorithm ORB-SLAM2 to run in real-time on the NVIDIA Jetson TX2. We adopted a data flow paradigm to process the images, obtaining an efficient CPU/GPU load distribution that results in a processing speed of about 30 frames per second. Quantitative experimental results on four different sequences of the KITTI datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The source code of our data flow ORB-SLAM2 algorithm is publicly available on GitHub.","PeriodicalId":428768,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)","volume":"83 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131234224","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}
Young Hun Lee, J. Koo, Hyoukryeol Choi, Y. Lee, Hyunyong Lee, Hansol Kang, Y. Kim, Jun Hyuk Lee, Luong Tin Phan, S. Jin, H. Moon
{"title":"Whole-Body Motion and Landing Force Control for Quadrupedal Stair Climbing","authors":"Young Hun Lee, J. Koo, Hyoukryeol Choi, Y. Lee, Hyunyong Lee, Hansol Kang, Y. Kim, Jun Hyuk Lee, Luong Tin Phan, S. Jin, H. Moon","doi":"10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8967527","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8967527","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper, we present a novel framework for quadrupedal stair climbing, which considers force interaction with stairs. For stable and robust climbing, a key issue is to avoid falling down on the stairs. From this point of view, control to minimize rate of change of angular momentum about Center of Mass (CoM) which is produced by ground reaction force (GRF) at contact of robot‘s foot is necessary. Using this approach, direct force-based Zero Moment Point (ZMP) for motion planning of the CoM and landing force control are implemented. The direct force-based ZMP method allows the robot to lift its foot with reduced possibility of tilting on the stairs, and the landing force control prevents instant increase of the moment by impact of the GRFs. In addition, terrain recognition to estimate parameters of the stairs and find proper footholds by vision system mounted on the robot is presented. Proposed framework is implemented to quadruped robot, AiDIN-VI, that has torque sensor at each joint, through experiments, capability of ascending several stairs including 3step stairs which have 21cm height (31% of its maximum leg length) and 26.5° inclination is validated.","PeriodicalId":428768,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131258684","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":"Trust But Verify: A Distributed Algorithm for Multi-Robot Wireframe Exploration and Mapping","authors":"Adam Caccavale, M. Schwager","doi":"10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8967932","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8967932","url":null,"abstract":"This paper presents a novel distributed mapping algorithm for multiple resource-constrained robots operating in a rectilinear 2D environment. The algorithm is built upon the sparse wireframe map representation and updating framework in [1]. We propose an exploration strategy based on the labeling of the vertices in the wireframe map, combined with a map-merging interrupt routine that is activated when robots enter into communication range with one another. The maps are not naively merged, but instead the receiving robot verifies the received information before it is assimilated by attempting to drive to the location where the other robot was when communication was established. The robots do not share a global coordinate frame, so prior to a merge the relative map alignment is determined. This is achieved using the random sample consensus (RANSAC) framework with a custom feature which leverages the structure inherent in the wireframe map representation. This results in a lower rate of false-positive matches compared to another state-of-the-art feature used in point cloud alignment, the 4-point congruent set (4PCS). We show our feature to be more robust to false-positive alignments, a common occurrence when attempting to align sparse structures such as wireframe maps. We present high fidelity simulation results in a ROS-Gazebo environment with lidar-equipped TurtleBots1 to highlight the benefits of our algorithm.1The TurtleBot3 burger configuration www.turtlebot.com","PeriodicalId":428768,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)","volume":"15 6","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133020962","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":"Task-Motion Planning with Reinforcement Learning for Adaptable Mobile Service Robots","authors":"Yuqian Jiang, Fangkai Yang, Shiqi Zhang, P. Stone","doi":"10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8967680","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8967680","url":null,"abstract":"Task-motion planning (TMP) addresses the problem of efficiently generating executable and low-cost task plans in a discrete space such that the (initially unknown) action costs are determined by motion plans in a corresponding continuous space. A task-motion plan for a mobile service robot that behaves in a highly dynamic domain can be sensitive to domain uncertainty and changes, leading to suboptimal behaviors or execution failures. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, TMP-RL, which is an integration of TMP and reinforcement learning (RL), to solve the problem of robust TMP in dynamic and uncertain domains. The robot first generates a low-cost, feasible task-motion plan by iteratively planning in the discrete space and updating relevant action costs evaluated by the motion planner in continuous space. During execution, the robot learns via model-free RL to further improve its task-motion plans. RL enables adaptability to the current domain, but can be costly with regards to experience; using TMP, which does not rely on experience, can jump-start the learning process before executing in the real world. TMP-RL is evaluated in a mobile service robot domain where the robot navigates in an office area, showing significantly improved adaptability to unseen domain dynamics over TMP and task planning (TP)-RL methods.","PeriodicalId":428768,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133687485","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}
Tino Fuhrman, D. Schneider, Felix Altenberg, T. Nguyen, Simon Blasen, Stefan Constantin, A. Waibel
{"title":"An Interactive Indoor Drone Assistant","authors":"Tino Fuhrman, D. Schneider, Felix Altenberg, T. Nguyen, Simon Blasen, Stefan Constantin, A. Waibel","doi":"10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8967587","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8967587","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":428768,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133438163","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}
David Schubert, Nikolaus Demmel, L. Stumberg, V. Usenko, D. Cremers
{"title":"Rolling-Shutter Modelling for Direct Visual-Inertial Odometry","authors":"David Schubert, Nikolaus Demmel, L. Stumberg, V. Usenko, D. Cremers","doi":"10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8968539","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8968539","url":null,"abstract":"We present a direct visual-inertial odometry (VIO) method which estimates the motion of the sensor setup and sparse 3D geometry of the environment based on measurements from a rolling-shutter camera and an inertial measurement unit (IMU). The visual part of the system performs a photometric bundle adjustment on a sparse set of points. This direct approach does not extract feature points and is able to track not only corners, but any pixels with sufficient gradient magnitude. Neglecting rolling-shutter effects in the visual part severely degrades accuracy and robustness of the system. In this paper, we incorporate a rolling-shutter model into the photometric bundle adjustment that estimates a set of recent keyframe poses and the inverse depth of a sparse set of points. IMU information is accumulated between several frames using measurement preintegration, and is inserted into the optimization as an additional constraint between selected keyframes. For every keyframe we estimate not only the pose but also velocity and biases to correct the IMU measurements. Unlike systems with global-shutter cameras, we use both IMU measurements and rolling-shutter effects of the camera to estimate velocity and biases for every state. Last, we evaluate our system on a new dataset that contains global-shutter and rolling-shutter images, IMU data and ground-truth poses for ten different sequences, which we make publicly available. Evaluation shows that the proposed method outperforms a system where rolling shutter is not modelled and achieves similar accuracy to the global-shutter method on global-shutter data.","PeriodicalId":428768,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)","volume":"895 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132151615","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":"Towards Explainable Shared Control using Augmented Reality","authors":"Mark Zolotas, Y. Demiris","doi":"10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8968117","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8968117","url":null,"abstract":"Shared control plays a pivotal role in establishing effective human-robot interactions. Traditional control-sharing methods strive to complement a human’s capabilities at safely completing a task, and thereby rely on users forming a mental model of the expected robot behaviour. However, these methods can often bewilder or frustrate users whenever their actions do not elicit the intended system response, forming a misalignment between the respective internal models of the robot and human. To resolve this model misalignment, we introduce Explainable Shared Control as a paradigm in which assistance and information feedback are jointly considered. Augmented reality is presented as an integral component of this paradigm, by visually unveiling the robot’s inner workings to human operators. Explainable Shared Control is instantiated and tested for assistive navigation in a setup involving a robotic wheelchair and a Microsoft HoloLens with add-on eye tracking. Experimental results indicate that the introduced paradigm facilitates transparent assistance by improving recovery times from adverse events associated with model misalignment.","PeriodicalId":428768,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132397587","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":"Effect of Planning Period on MPC-based Navigation for a Biped Robot in a Crowd","authors":"M. Ciocca, Pierre-Brice Wieber, Thierry Fraichard","doi":"10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8968070","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8968070","url":null,"abstract":"We control a biped robot moving in a crowd with a Model Predictive Control (MPC) scheme that generates stable walking motions, with automatic footstep placement. Most walking strategies propose to re-plan the walking motion to adapt to changing environments only once at every footstep. This is because a footstep is planted on the ground, it usually stays there at a constant position until the next footstep is initiated, what naturally constrains the capacity for the robot to react and adapt its motion in between footsteps. The objective of this paper is to measure if re-planning the walking motion more often than once at every footstep can lead to an improvement in collision avoidance when navigating in a crowd. Our result is that re-planning twice (or more) during each footstep leads to a significant reduction of the number of collisions when walking in a crowd, but depends on the density of the crowd.","PeriodicalId":428768,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132587517","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}
Yoan Sallami, Séverin Lemaignan, A. Clodic, R. Alami
{"title":"Simulation-based physics reasoning for consistent scene estimation in an HRI context","authors":"Yoan Sallami, Séverin Lemaignan, A. Clodic, R. Alami","doi":"10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8968106","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8968106","url":null,"abstract":"Reasoning about spatial and geometric relations between objects in a tabletop human-robot interaction is a challenge due to the perception not being always consistent: objects placed on a table seem to be slightly in the air; they overlap; they disappear due to occlusions. Yet, interpreting and anchoring perceptual data in a physically consistent estimation of the scene is a crucial ability for humans, and thus robots in HRI context. In this paper we present a simulation-based physics reasoner integrated in a lightweight situation-assessment framework called Underworlds, that allows the robot to stabilize objects and build at run-time a consistent estimation of the scene, even for entirely hidden objects, while inferring the actions performed by its human partner.","PeriodicalId":428768,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)","volume":"36 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132721738","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}