Robots are expected to operate autonomously in increasingly complex scenarios such as crowded streets or heavy traffic situations. Perceiving the dynamics of moving objects in the environment is crucial for safe and smart navigation and therefore a key enabler for autonomous driving. In this paper we present a novel model-free approach for detecting and tracking dynamic objects in 3D LiDAR scans obtained by a moving sensor. Our method only relies on motion cues and does not require any prior information about the objects. We sequentially detect multiple motions in the scene and segment objects using a Bayesian approach. For robustly tracking objects, we utilize their estimated motion models. We present extensive quantitative results based on publicly available datasets and show that our approach outperforms the state of the art.
Indoor localization is one of the crucial enablers for deployment of service robots. Although several successful techniques for indoor localization have been proposed, the majority of them relies on maps generated from data gathered with the same sensor modality used for localization. Typically, tedious labor by experts is needed to acquire this data, thus limiting the readiness of the system as well as its ease of installation for inexperienced operators. In this paper, we propose a memory and computationally efficient monocular camera-based localization system that allows a robot to estimate its pose given an architectural floor plan. Our method employs a convolutional neural network to predict room layout edges from a single camera image and estimates the robot pose using a particle filter that matches the extracted edges to the given floor plan. We evaluate our localization system using multiple realworld experiments and demonstrate that it has the robustness and accuracy required for reliable indoor navigation.
Robust data association is necessary for virtually every SLAM system and finding corresponding points is typically a preprocessing step for scan alignment algorithms. Traditionally, handcrafted feature descriptors were used for these problems but recently learned descriptors have been shown to perform more robustly. In this work, we propose a local feature descriptor for 3D LiDAR scans. The descriptor is learned using a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Our proposed architecture consists of a Siamese network for learning a feature descriptor and a metric learning network for matching the descriptors. We also present a method for estimating local surface patches and obtaining ground-truth correspondences. In extensive experiments, we compare our learned feature descriptor with existing 3D local descriptors and report highly competitive results for multiple experiments in terms of matching accuracy and computation time.
This paper presents a laser-aided navigation system for Micro Aerial Vehicles. It is based on a Kalman filter so that GNSS measurements can be incorporated if available. For GNSS-denied areas, the Kalman filter also processes relative pose measurements extracted from laser data. A novel approach for laser-aided Kalman filter navigation is presented which allows using multiple reference scans simultaneously. Furthermore, an addition to avoid growth of the heading angle error is described.Because this Kalman filter based system is a relative navigation system, its position error grows with time. To avoid such an error growth in GNSS denied environments, the Kalman filter is augmented with loop closure detection. A technique is proposed to represent such information in a pose graph and to calculate an improved navigation solution including an error covariance based on covariance intersection. The successful operation of the presented system is validated in several experiments including real flight data, large loops and an outdoor-indoor-outdoor transition.
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