Sonar Sensor-Based Efficient Exploration Method Using Sonar Salient Features and Several Gains

This paper describes a sonar sensor-based exploration method. To build an accurate map in an unknown environment during exploration, a simultaneous localization and mapping problem must be solved. Therefore, a new type of sonar feature called a ??sonar salient feature?? (SS-feature), is proposed for robust data association. The key concept of an SS-feature is to extract circle feature clouds on salient convex objects from environments by associating sets of sonar data. The SS-feature is used as an observation in the extended Kalman filter (EKF)-based SLAM framework. A suitable strategy is needed to efficiently explore the environment. We used utilities of driving cost, expected information about an unknown area, and localization quality. Through this strategy, the exploration method can greatly reduce behavior that leads a robot to explore a previously visited place, and thus shorten the exploration distance. A robot can select a favorable path for localization by localization gain during exploration. Thus, the robot can estimate its pose more robustly than other methods that do not consider localizability during exploration. This proposed exploration method was verified by various experiments, and it ensures that a robot can build an accurate map fully autonomously with sonar sensors in various home environments.     

Grid-Based Visual SLAM in Complex Environments

This paper presents a novel approach to the real-time SLAM problem that works in unstructured indoor environment with a single forward viewing camera. Most existing visual SLAM extract features from the environment, associate them in different images and produce a feature map as a result. However, we estimate the distances between the robot and the obstacles by applying a visual sonar ranging technique to the image and then associate this range data through the Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm and finally produce a grid map. Moreover, we construct a pseudo-dense scan (PDS) which is essentially a temporal accumulation of data, emulating a dense omni-directional sensing of the visual sonar readings based on odometry readings in order to overcome the sparseness of the visual sonar and then associate this scan with the previous one. Moreover, we further correct the slight trajectory error incurred in the PDS construction step to obtain a much more refined map using Sequential Quadratic Programming (SQP) which is a well-known optimization scheme. Experimental results show that our method can obtain an accurate grid map using a single camera alone without the need for more expensive.     

Autonomous Landing of MAVs on an Arbitrarily Textured Landing Site Using Onboard Monocular Vision

This paper presents a novel solution for micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) to autonomously search for and land on an arbitrary landing site using real-time monocular vision. The autonomous MAV is provided with only one single reference image of the landing site with an unknown size before initiating this task. We extend a well-known monocular visual SLAM algorithm that enables autonomous navigation of the MAV in unknown environments, in order to search for such landing sites. Furthermore, a multi-scale ORB feature based method is implemented and integrated into the SLAM framework for landing site detection. We use a RANSAC-based method to locate the landing site within the map of the SLAM system, taking advantage of those map points associated with the detected landing site. We demonstrate the efficiency of the presented vision system in autonomous flights, both indoor and in challenging outdoor environment.     

视觉SLAM在室内动态场景中的应用研究

视觉SLAM（Simultaneous Localization And Mapping,同时定位与建图）是移动机器人领域的核心技术,传统视觉SLAM还难以适用于高动态场景并且地图中缺少语义信息。提出一种动态环境语义SLAM方法,用深度学习网络对图像进行目标检测,检测动态目标所在区域,对图像进行特征提取并剔除动态物体所在区域的特征点,利用静态的特征点进行位姿计算,对关键帧进行语义分割,在构建语义地图时滤除动态物体的地图点构建出无动态物体干扰的语义地图。在TUM数据集上进行实验,结果显示该方法在动态环境下可以提升88.3%位姿估计精度,并且可同时构建出无动态物体干扰的语义地图。     

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。     

Map Management for Efficient Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM)

The solution to the simultaneous localization and map building (SLAM) problem where an autonomous vehicle starts in an unknown location in an unknown environment and then incrementally build a map of landmarks present in this environment while simultaneously using this map to compute absolute vehicle location is now well understood. Although a number of SLAM implementations have appeared in the recent literature, the need to maintain the knowledge of the relative relationships between all the landmark location estimates contained in the map makes SLAM computationally intractable in implementations containing more than a few tens of landmarks. This paper presents the theoretical basis and a practical implementation of a feature selection strategy that significantly reduces the computation requirements for SLAM. The paper shows that it is indeed possible to remove a large percentage of the landmarks from the map without making the map building process statistically inconsistent. Furthermore, it is shown that the computational cost of the SLAM algorithm can be reduced by judicious selection of landmarks to be preserved in the map.     

Bridging the gap between feature- and grid-based SLAM

One important design decision for the development of autonomously navigating mobile robots is the choice of the representation of the environment. This includes the question of which type of features should be used, or whether a dense representation such as occupancy grid maps is more appropriate. In this paper, we present an approach which performs SLAM using multiple representations of the environment simultaneously. It uses reinforcement to learn when to switch to an alternative representation method depending on the current observation. This allows the robot to update its pose and map estimate based on the representation that models the surrounding of the robot in the best way. The approach has been implemented on a real robot and evaluated in scenarios, in which a robot has to navigate in- and outdoors and therefore switches between a landmark-based representation and a dense grid map. In practical experiments, we demonstrate that our approach allows a robot to robustly map environments which cannot be adequately modeled by either of the individual representations.     

增强特征金字塔结构的显著目标检测算法

显著目标检测是计算机视觉的研究热点。显著目标检测算法存在一些问题,如：算法常采用单一损失函数,缺乏对多维特征损失的考虑,可能带来局限性;最高层特征图来源单一;特征图融合常使用对应像素相加,不能有效突出图像中感兴趣区域。针对上述问题,结合结构性相似、交并比和交叉熵三种损失函数来捕捉图像细节,采用对应像素相乘操作融合特征图,令模型对显著区域更加敏感;通过残差特征图增强模块逆向构建更高层特征图强化其语义信息;采用特征金字塔结构融合不同尺度信息,完成编码解码模块。在5个数据集的对比实验表明该方法性能超过主流算法,能实现有效的显著目标检测。     

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.     

完全在线的双目直接法视觉SLAM算法

视觉SLAM在机器人的室外作业如野外探索、定位侦察中扮演了重要角色.为了使得机器人可以更好地进行室外作业,提出一种不受词袋模型的固定词汇限制的完全在线实时双目直接法视觉SLAM算法.作为直接法视觉SLAM,所提到的系统可以利用任何具有足够强度梯度的图像像素,使其在缺少特征点的区域仍具有很强的鲁棒性.在系统算法中引入双目静态残差约束并去除遮挡的滑窗优化来增强系统的跟踪精度,增加闭环检测和位姿图优化模块,并建立在线词袋模型,使得系统在大规模且陌生的环境中依然可以进行工作.将此算法在公开的EuRoC数据集和KITTI数据集上进行性能评估,结果表明,所提出的系统的定位精度优于最先进的直接法视觉SLAM系统,且室内场景和室外场景均具有鲁棒性.     

基于显著图的SIFT特征检测与匹配

基于尺度不变特征变换(SIFT)特征的图像匹配存在特征点数量大、运算时间长等问题。为此,引入视觉注意机制,提出一种基于显著图的SIFT特征检测与匹配方法。比较常用的显著图计算模型,选择谱残差方法提取图片的显著图。对显著图进行二值化和形态学等处理,得到规则合理的显著区域。在显著区域内提取SIFT特征,生成特征向量,进行图像匹配。实验结果表明,该方法能提高运算效率,并且得到的SIFT特征更加稳定。     

实时更新的全局一致三维栅格建图

在未知的三维环境中,移动机器人自主导航通常需要实时构建与环境全局一致的栅格地图,而现有大部分系统缺少地图更新策略,构建的栅格地图与实际环境不一致.文中将同步定位与建图模块获得的环境信息以点云形式提供给栅格建图模块处理,同时提出基于关键帧的高效数据结构和地图实时更新策略,实时构建可用于移动机器人自主导航的全局一致的地图.室内动态的实验数据测试表明,文中方法可以有效实时更新地图,生成与环境一致的三维栅格地图,支持其后续的自主导航操作.     

Discovering Higher Level Structure in Visual SLAM

In this paper, we describe a novel method for discovering and incorporating higher level map structure in a real-time visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) system. Previous approaches use sparse maps populated by isolated features such as 3-D points or edgelets. Although this facilitates efficient localization, it yields very limited scene representation and ignores the inherent redundancy among features resulting from physical structure in the scene. In this paper, higher level structure, in the form of lines and surfaces, is discovered concurrently with SLAM operation, and then, incorporated into the map in a rigorous manner, attempting to maintain important cross-covariance information and allow consistent update of the feature parameters. This is achieved by using a bottom-up process, in which subsets of low-level features are “folded in” to a parameterization of an associated higher level feature, thus collapsing the state space as well as building structure into the map. We demonstrate and analyze the effects of the approach for the cases of line and plane discovery, both in simulation and within a real-time system operating with a handheld camera in an office environment.      

An Efficient Computational Hybrid Filter to the SLAM Problem for an Autonomous Wheeled Mobile Robot

The using of an autonomous wheeled mobile robot (AWMR) that perform diverse processes in a numerous number of applications without human’s interposition in an unknown environment is thriving, nowadays. An AWMR can search the environment, create an adequate map, and localizing itself into this map, by interpreting the environment, autonomously. The FastSLAM is a structure for simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) for an AWMR. The correctness and efficiency of the estimation of the FastSLAM often depend on the accurate a previous knowledge of the control and measurement noise covariance matrices. Also, inaccurate previous knowledge may seriously degrade their efficiency. One of the major causes of losing particle manifold is sample impoverishment in the FastSLAM. These cases of the most main problems. This paper presents a robust new method to solve these problems as called Hybrid filter SLAM. In this method, for learning the measurement and control noise covariance matrices for increasing correctness and consistency are utilized Intuitionistic Fuzzy Logic System (IFLS). In order to optimize efficiency of sampling from Cuckoo Search (CS). The results of the simulation and experimental shown that the Hybrid filter SLAM is efficient than the FastSLAM that has less number of computations and good performance for the larger environment.

     

基于栈式卷积自编码的视觉SLAM闭环检测

同时定位与构图(SLAM)主要用于解决移动机器人在未知环境中进行地图构建和导航的问题,是移动机器人实现自主移动的基础.闭环检测是视觉SLAM的关键步骤,对构建一致性地图和减少位姿累积误差具有重要作用.当前的闭环检测方法通常采用传统的SIFT、SURF等特征,很容易受到环境影响,为了提高闭环检测的准确性和鲁棒性,提出基于无监督栈式卷积自编码(CAEs)模型的特征提取方法,运用训练好的CAEs卷积神经网络对输入图像进行学习,将输出的特征应用于闭环检测.实验结果表明:与传统的BoW方法及其他基于深度学习模型的方法相比,所提出的算法能够有效降低图像特征的维数并改善特征描述的效果,可以在机器人SLAM闭环检测环节获得更好的精确性和鲁棒性.     

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.     

Discovering and restoring changes in object positions using an autonomous robot with laser rangefinders

This paper describes an object rearrangement system for an autonomous mobile robot. The objective of the robot is to autonomously explore and learn about an environment, to detect changes in the environment on a later visit after object disturbances and finally, to move objects back to their original positions. In the implementation, it is assumed that the robot does not have any prior knowledge of the environment and the positions of the objects. The system exploits Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM) and autonomous exploration techniques to achieve the task. These techniques allow the robot to perform localisation and mapping which is required to perform the object rearrangement task autonomously. The system includes an arrangement change detector, object tracking and map update that work with a Polar Scan Match (PSM) Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) SLAM system. In addition, a path planning technique for dragging and pushing an object is also presented in this paper. Experimental results of the integrated approach are shown to demonstrate that the proposed approach provides real-time autonomous object rearrangements by a mobile robot in an initially unknown real environment. Experiments also show the limits of the system by investigating failure modes.     

基于RGB-D图像的室内机器人同时定位与地图构建

同时定位与地图构建（SLAM）是机器人在未知环境实现自主导航的关键技术,针对目前常用的RGB-D SLAM系统实时性差和精确度低的问题,提出一种新的RGB-D SLAM系统,以进一步提升实时性和精确度。首先,采用ORB算法检测图像特征点,并对提取的特征点采用基于四叉树的均匀化策略进行处理,并结合词袋模型（BoW）进行特征匹配。然后,在系统相机姿态初始值估计阶段,结合PnP和非线性优化方法为后端优化提供一个更接近最优值的初始值;在后端优化中,使用光束法平差（BA）对相机姿态初始值进行迭代优化,从而得到相机姿态的最优值。最后,根据相机姿态和每帧点云地图的对应关系,将所有的点云数据注册到同一个坐标系中,得到场景的稠密点云地图,并对点云地图利用八叉树进行递归式的压缩以得到一种用于机器人导航的三维地图。在TUM RGB-D数据集上,将构建的RGB-D SLAM同RGB-D SLAMv2、ORB-SLAM2系统进行了对比,实验结果表明所构建的RGB-D SLAM系统在实时性和精确度上的综合表现更优。     

基于RGB-D图像的室内机器人同时定位与地图构建

同时定位与地图构建（SLAM）是机器人在未知环境实现自主导航的关键技术，针对目前常用的RGB-D SLAM系统实时性差和精确度低的问题，提出一种新的RGB-D SLAM系统，以进一步提升实时性和精确度。首先，采用ORB算法检测图像特征点，并对提取的特征点采用基于四叉树的均匀化策略进行处理，并结合词袋模型（BoW）进行特征匹配。然后，在系统相机姿态初始值估计阶段，结合PnP和非线性优化方法为后端优化提供一个更接近最优值的初始值；在后端优化中，使用光束法平差（BA）对相机姿态初始值进行迭代优化，从而得到相机姿态的最优值。最后，根据相机姿态和每帧点云地图的对应关系，将所有的点云数据注册到同一个坐标系中，得到场景的稠密点云地图，并对点云地图利用八叉树进行递归式的压缩以得到一种用于机器人导航的三维地图。在TUM RGB-D数据集上，将构建的RGB-D SLAM同RGB-D SLAMv2、ORB-SLAM2系统进行了对比，实验结果表明所构建的RGB-D SLAM系统在实时性和精确度上的综合表现更优。     

基于主动环形闭合约束的移动机器人分层同时定位和地图创建

基于Rao-Blackwellized 粒子滤波器提出了一种基于主动闭环策略的移动机器人分层同时定位和地图创建(simultaneous localization and mapping, SLAM)方法,基于信息熵的主动闭环策略同时考虑机器人位姿和地图的不确定性;局部几何特征地图之间的相对关系通过一致性算法估计,并通过环形闭合约束的最小化过程回溯修正.在仅有单目视觉和里程计的基础上,建立了鲁棒的感知模型;通过有效的尺度不变特征变换(scale invariant feature transform, SIFT)方法提取环境特征,基于KD-Tree的最近邻搜索算法实现特征匹配.实际实验表明该方法为实现SLAM提供了一种有效可靠的途径.