Robotic vehicles for planetary exploration

Future missions to the moon, Mars, or other planetary surfaces will use planetary rovers for exploration or other tasks. Operation of these rovers as unmanned robotic vehicles with some form of remote or semi-autonomous control is desirable to reduce the cost and increase the capability and safety of many types of missions. However, the long time delays and relatively low bandwidths associated with radio communications between planets precludes a total telepresence approach to controlling the vehicle. A program to develop planetary rover technology has been initiated at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) under sponsorship of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Developmental systems with the necessary sensing, computing, power, and mobility resources to demonstrate realistic forms of control for various missions have been developed and initial testing has been completed. These testbed systems, the associated navigation techniques currently used and planned for implementation, and long-term mission strategies employing them are described.     

Vibration-based terrain classification for planetary exploration rovers

Safe, autonomous mobility in rough terrain is an important requirement for planetary exploration rovers. Knowledge of local terrain properties is critical to ensure a rover's safety on slopes and uneven surfaces. Visual features are often used to classify terrain; however, vision can be sensitive to lighting variations and other effects. This paper presents a method to classify terrain based on vibrations induced in the rover structure by wheel-terrain interaction during driving. This sensing mode is robust to lighting variations. Vibrations are measured using an accelerometer mounted on the rover structure. The classifier is trained using labeled vibration data during an offline learning phase. Linear discriminant analysis is used for online identification of terrain classes, such as sand, gravel, or clay. This approach has been experimentally validated on a laboratory testbed and on a four-wheeled rover in outdoor conditions.     

NASA robotics research for planetary surface exploration

The surface systems technology under development has long-range objectives that are quite challenging and will lead to revolutionary capabilities. Many of the technologies needing development are in their infancy: multiple, coordinated multiscale (small and large) special robots forming networks; Remote robotic work systems; Extension of lifetime and power performance envelopes by orders of magnitude; Local robotic outpost communication architectures and systems, high-rate surface switching and aggregation centers, and/or aero-synchronous network relays; Manufacture of propellants, oxygen, water, and other resources. However, substantial initial steps are being made toward the long-range goals by seeking and supporting activities that lead to early proof-of-principle experiments in selected areas. Evolution of the technology and infusion into flight systems will require major achievements from the community of researchers involved, and this effort will be interesting and exciting     

Slip-compensated path following for planetary exploration rovers

A system that enables continuous slip compensation for a Mars rover has been designed, implemented and field-tested. This system is composed of several components that allow the rover to accurately and continuously follow a designated path, compensate for slippage and reach intended goals in high-slip environments. These components include visual odometry, vehicle kinematics, a Kalman filter pose estimator and a slip-compensated path follower. Visual odometry tracks distinctive scene features in stereo imagery to estimate rover motion between successively acquired stereo image pairs. The kinematics for a rocker–bogie suspension system estimates vehicle motion by measuring wheel rates, and rocker, bogie and steering angles. The Kalman filter processes measurements from an inertial measurement unit and visual odometry. The filter estimate is then compared to the kinematic estimate to determine whether slippage has occurred, taking into account estimate uncertainties. If slippage is detected, the slip vector is calculated by differencing the current Kalman filter estimate from the kinematic estimate. This slip vector is then used to determine the necessary wheel velocities and steering angles to compensate for slip and follow the desired path.     

Evidential reasoning for object recognition

The authors present a framework to guide development of evidential reasoning in object recognition systems. Principles of evidential reasoning processes for open-world object recognition are proposed and applied to build evidential reasoning capabilities. The principles summarize research and findings by the authors up through the mid-1990s, including seminal results in object-centered computer vision, figure-ground discrimination, and the application of hierarchical Bayesian inference, Bayesian networks, and decision graphs to evidential reasoning for object recognition.     

Probabilistic indexing for object recognition

Recent papers have indicated that indexing is a promising approach to fast model-based object recognition because it allows most of the possible matches between sets of image features and sets of model features to be quickly eliminated from consideration. This correspondence describes a system that is capable of indexing using sets of three points undergoing 3D transformations and projection by taking advantage of the probabilistic peaking effect. To be able to index using sets of three points, we must allow false negatives. These are overcome by ensuring that we examine several correct hypotheses. The use of these techniques to speed up the alignment method is described. Results are given on real and synthetic data     

Ambler: an autonomous rover for planetary exploration

The authors are building a prototype legged rover, called the Ambler (loosely an acronym for autonomous mobile exploration robot) and testing it on full-scale, rugged terrain of the sort that might be encountered on the Martian surface. They present an overview of their research program, focusing on locomotion, perception, planning, and control. They summarize some of the most important goals and requirements of a rover design and describe how locomotion, perception, and planning systems can satisfy these requirements. Since the program is relatively young (one year old at the time of writing) they identify issues and approaches and describe work in progress rather than report results. It is expected that many of the technologies developed will be applicable to other planetary bodies and to terrestrial concerns such as hazardous waste assessment and remediation, ocean floor exploration, and mining     

An object model for image recognition

The use of object-oriented database principles to help model an image for computer vision, specifically, for line-image analysis, is described. The resulting representation, called thin line code (TLC), is general across known applications and extensible to new applications. TLC's advantages, and also some difficulties it has in strictly adhering to traditional notions of object orientation, are addressed. A review of relevant aspects of object modeling is included     

Planning multiple observations for object recognition

Most computer vision systems perform object recognition on the basis of the features extracted from a single image of the object. The problem with this approach is that it implicitly assumes that the available features are sufficient to determine the identity and pose of the object uniquely. If this assumption is not met, then the feature set is insufficient, and ambiguity results. Consequently, much research in computer vision has gone toward finding sets of features that are sufficient for specific tasks, with the result that each system has its own associated set of features. A single, general feature set would be desirable. However, research in automatic generation of object recognition programs has demonstrated that predetermined, fixed feature sets are often incapable of providing enough information to unambiguously determine either object identity or pose. One approach to overcoming the inadequacy of any feature set is to utilize multiple sensor observations obtained from different viewpoints, and combine them with knowledge of the 3-D structure of the object to perform unambiguous object recognition. This article presents initial results toward performing object recognition by using multiple observations to resolve ambiguities. Starting from the premise that sensor motions should be planned in advance, the difficulties involved in planning with ambiguous information are discussed. A representation for planning that combines geometric information with viewpoint uncertainty is presented. A sensor planner utilizing the representation was implemented, and the results of pose-determination experiments performed with the planner are discussed.     

面向灵巧操作的视觉目标识别

为了能够实现灵巧手对目标物体进行精准操作,研究了一种利用Kinect检测出目标物体,在帧差法的基础上对获取的深度进行背景相减,获取出目标物体的运动点,在此基础上利用获取的目标物体的特征采用T-S模糊逻辑判断出目标物体的方法,以BH8-280对目标物体进行抓取实验为例,在实验中,Kinect在帧差法的基础上检测出目标物体的位姿,大小,形状,以此为基础建立起T-S模糊逻辑系统,判断出目标物体的属性和类别,通过实验结果进一步说明了利用本文研究的方法显著地提高了判断物体的准确率和效率,为灵巧手的精细控制抓取奠定了基础。     

A stereo-vision system for support of planetary surface exploration

Abstract. In this paper, we present a system that was developed for the European Space Agency (ESA) for the support of planetary exploration. The system that is sent to the planetary surface consists of a rover and a lander. The lander contains a stereo head equipped with a pan-tilt mechanism. This vision system is used both for modeling the terrain and for localization of the rover. Both tasks are necessary for the navigation of the rover. Due to the stress that occurs during the flight, a recalibration of the stereo-vision system is required once it is deployed on the planet. Practical limitations make it unfeasible to use a known calibration pattern for this purpose; therefore, a new calibration procedure had to be developed that could work on images of the planetary environment. This automatic procedure recovers the relative orientation of the cameras and the pan and tilt axes, as well as the exterior orientation for all the images. The same images are subsequently used to reconstruct the 3-D structure of the terrain. For this purpose, a dense stereo-matching algorithm is used that (after rectification) computes a disparity map. Finally, all the disparity maps are merged into a single digital terrain model. In this paper, a simple and elegant procedure is proposed that achieves that goal. The fact that the same images can be used for both calibration and 3-D reconstruction is important, since, in general, the communication bandwidth is very limited. In addition to navigation and path planning, the 3-D model of the terrain is also used for virtual-reality simulations of the mission, wherein the model is texture mapped with the original images. The system has been implemented, and the first tests on the ESA planetary terrain testbed were successful.     

Coupled-learning convolutional neural networks for object recognition

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNN) have been attracting considerable attention in various computer vision tasks. Motivated by neuroscience, CNN has...     

Graph matching for object recognition and recovery

A robust skeleton-based graph matching method for object recognition and recovery applications is presented. The object model uses both a skeleton model and contour segment models, for object recognition and recovery. The presented skeleton-based shape matching method uses a combination of both structural and statistical methods that are applied in a sequential manner, which largely reduce the matching space when compared with previous works. This also provides a good alternate means to alleviate difficulties encountered in segmentation problems. Experiments of object recovery using real biomedical image samples have shown satisfactory results.     

Illumination planning for object recognition using parametriceigenspaces

Presents a novel approach to the problem of illumination planning for robust object recognition in structured environments. Given a set of objects, the goal is to determine the illumination for which the objects are most distinguishable in appearance from each other. Correlation is used as a measure of similarity between objects. For each object, a large number of images is automatically obtained by varying the pose and the illumination direction. Images of all objects together constitute the planning image set. The planning set is compressed using the Karhunen-Loeve transform to obtain a low-dimensional subspace, called the eigenspace. For each illumination direction, objects are represented as parametrized manifolds in the eigenspace. The minimum distance between the manifolds of two objects represents the similarity between the objects in the correlation sense. The optimal source direction is therefore the one that maximizes the shortest distance between the object manifolds. Several experiments have been conducted using real objects. The results produced by the illumination planner have been used to enhance the performance of an object recognition system     

运用Vague集进行多传感器目标识别

针对具有多个特征指标的多传感器目标识别问题,采用 Vague 集表达目标特征的不确定信息,提出了一种新的多传感器目标识别方法.定义两 Vague 集之间的加权 Hamming 距离和相似度,建立了Vague 集表达的多传感器目标识别模型,通过最小化各目标类型的 Vague 度优化模型客观地确定了各特征的权重,利用相似度...     

A graph isomorphism algorithm for object recognition

We present an algorithm to solve the graph isomorphism problem for the purpose of object recognition. Objects, such as those which exist in a robot workspace, may be represented by labelled graphs (graphs with attributes on their nodes and/or edges). Thereafter, object recognition is achieved by matching pairs of these graphs. Assuming that all objects are sufficiently different so that their corresponding representative graphs are distinct, then given a new graph, the algorthm efficiently finds the isomorphic stored graph (if it exists). The algorithm consists of three phases: preprocessing, link construction, and ambiguity resolution. Results from experiments on a wide variety and sizes of graphs are reported. Results are also reported for experiments on recognising graphs that represent protein molecules. The algorithm works for all types of graphs except for a class of highly ambiguous graphs which includes strongly regular graphs. However, members of this class are detected in polynomial time, which leaves the option of switching to a higher complexity algorithm if desired.     

A tree-based context model for object recognition

There has been a growing interest in exploiting contextual information in addition to local features to detect and localize multiple object categories in an image. A context model can rule out some unlikely combinations or locations of objects and guide detectors to produce a semantically coherent interpretation of a scene. However, the performance benefit of context models has been limited because most of the previous methods were tested on data sets with only a few object categories, in which most images contain one or two object categories. In this paper, we introduce a new data set with images that contain many instances of different object categories, and propose an efficient model that captures the contextual information among more than a hundred object categories using a tree structure. Our model incorporates global image features, dependencies between object categories, and outputs of local detectors into one probabilistic framework. We demonstrate that our context model improves object recognition performance and provides a coherent interpretation of a scene, which enables a reliable image querying system by multiple object categories. In addition, our model can be applied to scene understanding tasks that local detectors alone cannot solve, such as detecting objects out of context or querying for the most typical and the least typical scenes in a data set.