Abstract-We introduce the Imperial College London and National University of Ireland Maynooth (ICL-NUIM) dataset for the evaluation of visual odometry, 3D reconstruction and SLAM algorithms that typically use RGB-D data. We present a collection of handheld RGB-D camera sequences within synthetically generated environments. RGB-D sequences with perfect ground truth poses are provided as well as a ground truth surface model that enables a method of quantitatively evaluating the final map or surface reconstruction accuracy. Care has been taken to simulate typically observed real-world artefacts in the synthetic imagery by modelling sensor noise in both RGB and depth data. While this dataset is useful for the evaluation of visual odometry and SLAM trajectory estimation, our main focus is on providing a method to benchmark the surface reconstruction accuracy which to date has been missing in the RGB-D community despite the plethora of ground truth RGB-D datasets available.

Ever more robust, accurate and detailed mapping using visual sensing has proven to be an enabling factor for mobile robots across a wide variety of applications. For the next level of robot intelligence and intuitive user interaction, maps need extend beyond geometry and appearence -they need to contain semantics. We address this challenge by combining Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and a state of the art dense Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM) system, ElasticFusion, which provides long-term dense correspondence between frames of indoor RGB-D video even during loopy scanning trajectories. These correspondences allow the CNN's semantic predictions from multiple view points to be probabilistically fused into a map. This not only produces a useful semantic 3D map, but we also show on the NYUv2 dataset that fusing multiple predictions leads to an improvement even in the 2D semantic labelling over baseline single frame predictions. We also show that for a smaller reconstruction dataset with larger variation in prediction viewpoint, the improvement over single frame segmentation increases. Our system is efficient enough to allow real-time interactive use at frame-rates of ≈25Hz.

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Fig. 1. Policies for opening a cabinet drawer and swing-peg-in-hole tasks trained by alternatively performing reinforcement learning with multiple agents in simulation and updating simulation parameter distribution using a few real world policy executions.Abstract-We consider the problem of transferring policies to the real world by training on a distribution of simulated scenarios. Rather than manually tuning the randomization of simulations, we adapt the simulation parameter distribution using a few real world roll-outs interleaved with policy training. In doing so, we are able to change the distribution of simulations to improve the policy transfer by matching the policy behavior in simulation and the real world. We show that policies trained with our method are able to reliably transfer to different robots in two real world tasks: swing-peg-in-hole and opening a cabinet drawer. The video of our experiments can be found at https: //sites.google.com/view/simopt.