Position estimation of a mobile robot using images of a moving target in intelligent space with distributed sensors

Latest advances in hardware technology and state-of-the-art of mobile robots and artificial intelligence research can be employed to develop autonomous and distributed monitoring systems. A mobile service robot requires the perception of its present position to co-exist with humans and support humans effectively in populated environments. To realize this, a robot needs to keep track of relevant changes in the environment. This paper proposes localization of a mobile robot using images recognized by distributed intelligent networked devices in intelligent space (ISpace) in order to achieve these goals. This scheme combines data from the observed position, using dead-reckoning sensors, and the estimated position, using images of moving objects, such as a walking human captured by a camera system, to determine the location of a mobile robot. The moving object is assumed to be a point-object and projected onto an image plane to form a geometrical constraint equation that provides position data of the object based on the kinematics of the ISpace. Using the a priori known path of a moving object and a perspective camera model, the geometric constraint equations that represent the relation between image frame coordinates for a moving object and the estimated robot's position are derived. The proposed method utilizes the error between the observed and estimated image coordinates to localize the mobile robot, and the Kalman filtering scheme is used for the estimation of the mobile robot location. The proposed approach is applied for a mobile robot in ISpace to show the reduction of uncertainty in determining the location of a mobile robot, and its performance is verified by computer simulation and experiment.     

激光—相机系统语义栅格建图和路径规划

目的 SLAM（simultaneous localization and mapping）是移动机器人在未知环境进行探索、感知和导航的关键技术。激光SLAM测量精确，便于机器人导航和路径规划，但缺乏语义信息。而视觉SLAM的图像能提供丰富的语义信息，特征区分度更高，但其构建的地图不能直接用于路径规划和导航。为了实现移动机器人构建语义地图并在地图上进行路径规划，本文提出一种语义栅格建图方法。方法 建立可同步获取激光和语义数据的激光-相机系统，将采集的激光分割数据与目标检测算法获得的物体包围盒进行匹配，得到各物体对应的语义激光分割数据。将连续多帧语义激光分割数据同步融入占据栅格地图。对具有不同语义类别的栅格进行聚类，得到标注物体类别和轮廓的语义栅格地图。此外，针对语义栅格地图发布导航任务，利用路径搜索算法进行路径规划，并对其进行改进。结果 在实验室走廊和办公室分别进行了语义栅格建图的实验，并与原始栅格地图进行了比较。在语义栅格地图的基础上进行了路径规划，并采用了语义赋权算法对易移动物体的路径进行对比。结论 多种环境下的实验表明本文方法能获得与真实环境一致性较高、标注环境中物体类别和轮廓的语义栅格地图，且实验硬件结构简单、成本低、性能良好，适用于智能化机器人的导航和路径规划。     

基于单目视频路径移动机器人导航方法研究

以单目视觉中双视图定位为基础,提出了一种基于单目视频路径的导航方法.算法基于单目摄像机提取一组有序的关键图像,以代表视频路径,使用Harris角点算法提取图像特征点,利用零均值归一化互相关算法进行图像匹配,根据单目摄像机双视图匹配点之间的约束关系求出基础矩阵并优化,得到位姿参数,完成了移动机器人定位,使其在视频路径的指导下实现自主导航.验证表明:方法在室外环境中具有较好的实用性.     

自主导航移动机器人视觉系统的一种标定方法

设计了一种基于视场中单个目标点的视觉系统标定方法,任意选取视场中的一点作为目标点,以该目标点为基准,机器人作相对运动来获得多个特征点。建立图像系列对应点之间的几何约束关系及各坐标系之间的变换矩阵,确定变换矩阵关系式,进一步求解摄像机的内外参数。该标定方法只需提取场景中的一个景物点,对机器人的运动控制操作方便、算法实现简洁。实验结果验证了该方法的有效性。     

Omnidirectional Vision and Inertial Clues for Robot Navigation

The structural features inherent in the visual motion field of a mobile robot contain useful clues about its navigation. The combination of these visual clues and additional inertial sensor information may allow reliable detection of the navigation direction for a mobile robot and also the independent motion that might be present in the 3D scene. The motion field, which is the 2D projection of the 3D scene variations induced by the camera‐robot system, is estimated through optical flow calculations. The singular points of the global optical flow field of omnidirectional image sequences indicate the translational direction of the robot as well as the deviation from its planned path. It is also possible to detect motion patterns of near obstacles or independently moving objects of the scene. In this paper, we introduce the analysis of the intrinsic features of the omnidirectional motion fields, in combination with gyroscopical information, and give some examples of this preliminary analysis. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

基于QPSO 算法移动机器人轨迹规划与实验

针对移动机器人路径规划问题,提出一种基于QPSO算法的路径规划方法,并用概率论的方法分析了移动机器人路径规划的收敛性,阐明了该方法随均匀分布和正态分布的参数关系和收敛区间;然后根据移动机器人的运动特征提出一种改进的轨迹规划方法。移动机器人平台的实验结果表明了该方法在移动机器人路径规划中的有效性和可行性。     

SLAM in Indoor Environments using Omni-directional Vertical and Horizontal Line Features

An autonomous mobile robot must have the ability to navigate in an unknown environment. The simultaneous localization and map building (SLAM) problem have relation to this autonomous ability. Vision sensors are attractive equipment for an autonomous mobile robot because they are information-rich and rarely have restrictions on various applications. However, many vision based SLAM methods using a general pin-hole camera suffer from variation in illumination and occlusion, because they mostly extract corner points for the feature map. Moreover, due to the narrow field of view of the pin-hole camera, they are not adequate for a high speed camera motion. To solve these problems, this paper presents a new SLAM method which uses vertical lines extracted from an omni-directional camera image and horizontal lines from the range sensor data. Due to the large field of view of the omni-directional camera, features remain in the image for enough time to estimate the pose of the robot and the features more accurately. Furthermore, since the proposed SLAM does not use corner points but the lines as the features, it reduces the effect of illumination and partial occlusion. Moreover, we use not only the lines at corners of wall but also many other vertical lines at doors, columns and the information panels on the wall which cannot be extracted by a range sensor. Finally, since we use the horizontal lines to estimate the positions of the vertical line features, we do not require any camera calibration. Experimental work based on MORIS, our mobile robot test bed, moving at a human’s pace in the real indoor environment verifies the efficacy of this approach.     

Indoor navigation of a non-holonomic mobile robot using a visual memory

When navigating in an unknown environment for the first time, a natural behavior consists on memorizing some key views along the performed path, in order to use these references as checkpoints for a future navigation mission. The navigation framework for wheeled mobile robots presented in this paper is based on this assumption. During a human-guided learning step, the robot performs paths which are sampled and stored as a set of ordered key images, acquired by an embedded camera. The set of these obtained visual paths is topologically organized and provides a visual memory of the environment. Given an image of one of the visual paths as a target, the robot navigation mission is defined as a concatenation of visual path subsets, called visual route. When running autonomously, the robot is controlled by a visual servoing law adapted to its nonholonomic constraint. Based on the regulation of successive homographies, this control guides the robot along the reference visual route without explicitly planning any trajectory. The proposed framework has been designed for the entire class of central catadioptric cameras (including conventional cameras). It has been validated onto two architectures. In the first one, algorithms have been implemented onto a dedicated hardware and the robot is equipped with a standard perspective camera. In the second one, they have been implemented on a standard PC and an omnidirectional camera is considered.

A fast and accurate moving object tracker in active camera model

Detecting and tracking moving objects within a scene is an essential step for high-level machine vision applications such as video content analysis. In this paper, we propose a fast and accurate method for tracking an object of interest in a dynamic environment (active camera model). First, we manually select the region of the object of interest and extract three statistical features, namely the mean, the variance and the range of intensity values of the feature points lying inside the selected region. Then, using the motion information of the background’s feature points and k-means clustering algorithm, we calculate camera motion transformation matrix. Based on this matrix, the previous frame is transformed to the current frame’s coordinate system to compensate the impact of camera motion. Afterwards, we detect the regions of moving objects within the scene using our introduced frame difference algorithm. Subsequently, utilizing DBSCAN clustering algorithm, we cluster the feature points of the extracted regions in order to find the distinct moving objects. Finally, we use the same statistical features (the mean, the variance and the range of intensity values) as a template to identify and track the moving object of interest among the detected moving objects. Our approach is simple and straightforward yet robust, accurate and time efficient. Experimental results on various videos show an acceptable performance of our tracker method compared to complex competitors.     

Study on Visual Positioning Based on Homography for Indoor Mobile Robot

Monocular visual positioning for indoor mobile robot is concerned in this paper.A new visual positioning method based on homography matrix in Euclidean space is proposed.It can calculate the position and pose of the mobile robot according to the intrinsic parameters of camera and two position-known points in a plane.It is very simple and low cost in computation.The experimental results show its effectiveness.     

基于单应性矩阵的室内移动机器人视觉定位研究

Monocular visual positioning for indoor mobile robot is concerned in this paper. A new visual positioning method based on homography matrix in Euclidean space is proposed. It can calculate the position and pose of the mobile robot according to the intrinsic parameters of camera and two position-known points in a plane. It is very simple and low cost in computation. The experimental results show its effectiveness.     

基于特征点分类策略的移动机器人运动估计

为解决移动机器人视觉导航系统在进行机器人运动估计时使用传统运动估计算法计算时间较长而导致实时性较差的问题,提出了一种基于特征点分类策略的移动机器人运动估计方法。根据移动机器人视觉导航系统提供的特征点三维坐标计算出特征点与机器人的距离,从而将特征点分为远点与近点。远点对于机器人的旋转运动是敏感的,因此可用于计算移动机器人的旋转矩阵;近点对于机器人的平移运动是敏感的,因此可用于计算机器人的平移矩阵。仿真实验中,当远点与近点数为原特征点数目的30%时,基于特征点分类策略的运动估计计算精度与传统RANSAC算法相当,并能减少60%的计算时间。仿真结果表明,基于特征点分类策略的运动估计方法能在不降低计算精度的前提下有效减少计算时间,在特征点数目较多时也能很好地适应实时性要求。     

3D monocular robotic ball catching

A new method to catch a thrown ball with a robot endowed with an eye-in-hand monocular visual system integrated into a gripper is proposed. As soon as the thrown ball is recognized by the visual system, the camera carried by the robot end-effector is forced to follow a baseline in the space so as to acquire an initial dataset of visual measurements from several points of view, providing a first estimate of the catching point through a linear estimation algorithm. Hereafter, additional measurements are acquired to constantly refine the previous estimate by exploiting a nonlinear estimation algorithm. During the robot trajectory, the translational components of the camera are controlled in such a way as to follow the planned path to intercept the ball, while the rotational components are forced to keep the ball into the field of view. Experimental results performed on a common industrial robotic system prove the effectiveness of the presented solution.     

A Bezier curve based path planning in a multi-agent robot soccer system without violating the acceleration limits

This paper proposes an efficient, Bezier curve based approach for the path planning of a mobile robot in a multi-agent robot soccer system. The boundary conditions required for defining the Bezier curve are compatible with the estimated initial state of the robot and the ball. The velocity of the robot along the path is varied continuously to its maximum allowable levels by keeping its acceleration within the safe limits. An obstacle avoidance scheme is incorporated for dealing with the stationary and moving obstacles. When the robot is approaching a moving obstacle in the field, it is decelerated and deviated to another Bezier path leading to the estimated target position. The radius of curvature of the path at its end points is determined from the known terminal velocity constraint of the robot.     

MOTION PLANNING OF AN INTELLIGENT ROBOT USING GA MOTIVATED TEMPORAL ASSOCIATIVE MEMORY

ABSTRACT

The paper discusses the concept of re-planning for a mobile robot in the presence of semidynamic obstacles. The navigational planning is done by employing genetic algorithm until it reaches the goal point. The path segments traversed by the mobile robot are stored by a simple matrix, employing temporal associative memory. During subsequent traversal, the robot utilizes the previously stored matrix to avoid an obstacle path. In case of deadlock, the robot back tracks using TAM and finds alternative paths to reach the goal. This algorithm has been realized on a Pioneer 2DX mobile robot of ActiveMedia Robotic LLC, USA, through client server architecture. The result shows that the robot reaches the goal within a vicinity of a 20 mm radius.     

非结构化环境下的单目视觉可通行区域检测

目前三维避障主要采用三维激光雷达或者基于深度学习的障碍物识别,但前者价格昂贵,后者训练成本高且不稳定。为了稳定、鲁棒地实现低成本三维空间避障方案,提出了一种基于单目相机的可通行区域检测方法。该方法利用特征点标识障碍物,通过对相机高度和旋转平面加以约束,解决单目SLAM中的尺度不一致问题,并设计了障碍物距离求解器和代价求解器对小车前方区域特征点进行处理,计算出视觉代价地图,划分可通行区域。该方法优势在于仅需要低成本的单目相机便可完成可通行区域检测任务,可方便地移植到轻量级的移动设备,计算得到的视觉代价地图亦有利于小车后续的路径规划任务。在KITTI数据集上进行的实验表明,该方法的平均运算速度能达到20 frame/s,能满足小车实时避障的要求,对于单目SLAM的尺度恢复误差为2.5%～4.9%。     

一种基于手绘地图的动态环境视觉导航方法

提出了一种基于手绘地图和路径的移动机器人视觉导航方法.首先,根据较小偏差的原则提取运行路径中的关键引导点,以便将原始路径分成多段.然后,移动机器人在各段运行过程中,对预先绘制的于绘地图中对应的参考图像以及机器人摄像头实时采集到的图像信息进行匹配,这罩提出预测估计的方法估计当前视野中最可能存在的图像,以加速图像的匹配过程...     

一种新颖的基于两个特征点的室内移动机器人定位方法

提出了一种新颖的基于两个特征点的室内移动机器人定位方法。与已有的几何位姿估计方法或航标匹配方法不同,该方法不需要人工航标,也不需要准确的环境地图,只需一幅由传统的CCD相机拍摄的图像。从机器人接近的目标上选取相对于地面等高的两个点作为两个特征点。基于这两点建立一个目标坐标系。在相机平视且这两个特征点与相机投影中心相对于地面不是恰好等高的条件下,就可以根据这两个特征点在图像中的坐标确定机器人相对于目标坐标系的位置和运动方向。该方法非常灵活,适用范围广,可以大大简化机器人定位问题。试验结果表明这一新的方法不仅简单灵活而且具有很高的定位精度。     

Novel Sonar Salient Feature Structure for Extended Kalman Filter-Based Simultaneous Localization and Mapping of Mobile Robots

Abstract

Not all line or point features capable of being extracted by sonar sensors from a cluttered home environment are useful for simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) of a mobile robot. This is due to unfavorable conditions such as environmental ambiguity and sonar measurement uncertainty. We present a novel sonar feature structure suitable for a cluttered environment and the extended Kalman filter (EKF)-based SLAM scheme. The key concept is to extract circle feature clouds on salient convex objects by sonar data association called convex saliency circling. The centroid of each circle cloud, called a sonar salient feature, is used as a natural landmark for EKF-based SLAM. By investigating the environmental inherent feature locality, cylindrical objects are augmented conveniently at the weak SLAM-able area as a natural supplementary saliency to achieve consistent SLAM performance. Experimental results demonstrate the validity and robustness of the proposed sonar salient feature structure for EKF-based SLAM.