Abstract-Ego-motion estimation and environment mapping are two recurring problems in the field of robotics. In this work we propose a simple on-line method for tracking the pose of a depth camera in six degrees of freedom and simultaneously maintaining an updated 3D map, represented as a truncated signed distance function. The distance function representation implicitly encodes surfaces in 3D-space and is used directly to define a cost function for accurate registration of new data. The proposed algorithm is highly parallel and achieves good accuracy compared to state of the art methods. It is suitable for reconstructing single household items, workspace environments and small rooms at near real-time rates, making it practical for use on modern CPU hardware.
This article discusses the scientifically and industrially important problem of automating the process of unloading goods from standard shipping containers. We outline some of the challenges barring further adoption of robotic solutions to this problem: ranging from handling a vast variety of shapes, sizes, weights, appearance and packing arrangement of the goods, through hard demands on unloading speed and reliability, to ensuring fragile goods are not damaged. We propose a modular and reconfigurable software framework in an attempt at efficiently addressing some of these challenges. We outline the general framework design, as well as the basic functionality of the core modules developed and present two instantiations of the software system on two different fully integrated demonstrators. While one is coping with an industrial scenario, namely the automated unloading of coffee sacks, with an already economically interesting performance, the other scenario is used to demonstrate the capabilities of our scientific and technological developments in the context of medium-to long-term prospects of automation in logistics. We performed evaluations which allow us to summarize several important lessons learned and to identify future directions of research on autonomous robots for handling of goods in logistics applications.
Abstract:In order to deal with the scaling problem of volumetric map representations, we propose spatially local methods for high-ratio compression of 3D maps, represented as truncated signed distance fields. We show that these compressed maps can be used as meaningful descriptors for selective decompression in scenarios relevant to robotic applications. As compression methods, we compare using PCA-derived low-dimensional bases to nonlinear auto-encoder networks. Selecting two application-oriented performance metrics, we evaluate the impact of different compression rates on reconstruction fidelity as well as to the task of map-aided ego-motion estimation. It is demonstrated that lossily reconstructed distance fields used as cost functions for ego-motion estimation can outperform the original maps in challenging scenarios from standard RGB-D (color plus depth) data sets due to the rejection of high-frequency noise content.
Abstract-In this work we propose a method to effectively remove noise from depth images obtained with a commodity structured light sensor. The proposed approach fuses data into a consistent frame of reference over time, thus utilizing prior depth measurements and viewpoint information in the noise removal process. The effectiveness of the approach is compared to two state of the art, single-frame denoising methods in the context of feature descriptor matching and keypoint detection stability. To make more general statements about the effect of noise removal in these applications, we extend a method for evaluating local image gradient feature descriptors to the domain of 3D shape descriptors. We perform a comparative study of three classes of such descriptors: Normal Aligned Radial Features, Fast Point Feature Histograms and Depth Kernel Descriptors; and evaluate their performance on a realworld industrial application data set. We demonstrate that noise removal enabled by the dense map representation results in major improvements in matching across all classes of descriptors as well as having a substantial positive impact on keypoint detection reliability.
Voxel volumes are simple to implement and lend themselves to many of the tools and algorithms available for 2D images. However, the additional dimension of voxels may be costly to manage in memory when mapping large spaces at high resolutions. While lowering the resolution and using interpolation is common work-around, in the literature we often find that authors either use trilinear interpolation or nearest neighbors and rarely any of the intermediate options. This paper presents a survey of geometric interpolation methods for voxel-based map representations. In particular we study the truncated signed distance field (TSDF) and the impact of using fewer than 8 samples to perform interpolation within a depth-camera pose tracking and mapping scenario. We find that lowering the number of samples fetched to perform the interpolation results in performance similar to the commonly used trilinear interpolation method, but leads to higher framerates. We also report that lower bit-depth generally leads to performance degradation, though not as much as may be expected, with voxels containing as few as 3 bits sometimes resulting in adequate estimation of camera trajectories.
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