Probabilistic Data Association via Mixture Models for Robust Semantic SLAM
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)（麻省理工学院）；University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst)（马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校）
Kevin Doherty, David Baxter, Edward Schneeweiss, John Leonard
备注：
Authors D. Baxter and E. Schneeweiss contributed equally to this work. Submitted to the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2020
Modern robotic systems sense the environment geometrically, through sensors like cameras, lidar, and sonar, as well as semantically, often through visual models learned from data, such as object detectors. We aim to develop robots that can use all of these sources of information for reliable navigation, but each is corrupted by noise. Rather than assume that object detection will eventually achieve near perfect performance across the lifetime of a robot, in this work we represent and cope with the semantic and geometric uncertainty inherent in methods like object detection. Specifically, we model data association ambiguity, which is typically non-Gaussian, in a way that is amenable to solution within the common nonlinear Gaussian formulation of simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). We do so by eliminating data association variables from the inference process through max-marginalization, preserving standard Gaussian posterior assumptions. The result is a max-mixture-type model that accounts for multiple data association hypotheses as well as incorrect loop closures. We provide experimental results on indoor and outdoor semantic navigation tasks with noisy odometry and object detection and find that the ability of the proposed approach to represent multiple hypotheses, including the "null" hypothesis, gives substantial robustness advantages in comparison to alternative semantic SLAM approaches.
BPDA-GMM: Bayesian Probabilistic Data Association via Gaussian Mixture Models for Semantic SLAM
School of Information Science, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology（信息科学学系，日本科学技术大学）；University of Engineering and Technology, Vietnam National University（工程技术大学，越南国家大学）
Using pole and plane objects in lidar SLAM can increase accuracy and decrease map storage requirements compared to commonly-used point cloud maps. However, place recognition and geometric verification using these landmarks is challenging due to the requirement for global matching without an initial guess. Existing works typically only leverage either pole or plane landmarks, limiting application to a restricted set of environments. We present a global data association method for loop closure in lidar scans using 3D line and plane objects simultaneously and in a unified manner. The main novelty…
Simultaneous mapping and localization (SLAM) in an real indoor environment is still a challenging task. Traditional SLAM approaches rely heavily on low-level geometric constraints like corners or lines, which may lead to tracking failure in textureless surroundings or cluttered world with dynamic objects. In this paper, a compact semantic SLAM framework is proposed, with utilization of both geometric and object-level semantic constraints jointly, a more consistent mapping result, and more accurate pose estimation can be obtained. Two main contributions are presented int the paper, a) a robust …
Despite the existence of different error metrics for trajectory evaluation in SLAM, their theoretical justifications and connections are rarely studied, and few methods handle temporal association properly. In this work, we propose to formulate the trajectory evaluation problem in a probabilistic, continuous-time framework. By modeling the groundtruth as random variables, the concepts of absolute and relative error are generalized to be likelihood. Moreover, the groundtruth is represented as a piecewise Gaussian Process in continuous-time. Within this framework, we are able to establish theore…
It is often desirable to capture and map semantic information of an environment during simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). Such semantic information can enable a robot to better distinguish places with similar low-level geometric and visual features and perform high-level tasks that use semantic information about objects to be manipulated and environments to be navigated. While semantic SLAM has gained increasing attention, there is little research on semanticlevel data association based on semantic objects, i.e., object-level data association. In this paper, we propose a novel objec…
Mapping and self-localization in unknown environments are fundamental capabilities in many robotic applications. These tasks typically involve the identification of objects as unique features or landmarks, which requires the objects both to be detected and then assigned a unique identifier that can be maintained when viewed from different perspectives and in different images. The \textit{data association} and \textit{simultaneous localization and mapping} (SLAM) problems are, individually, well-studied in the literature. But these two problems are inherently tightly coupled, and that has not b…
POV-SLAM: Probabilistic Object-Aware Variational SLAM in Semi-Static Environments
The University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies（多伦多大学航空航天研究所）；The Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Clearpath Robotics（Clearpath机器人公司）；The Technical University of Nuremberg（纽伦堡工业大学）
Faculty of Robot Science and Engineering, Northeastern University（东北大学机器人科学与工程学院）；College of Information Science and Engineering, Northeastern University（东北大学信息科学与工程学院）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Object-level data association and pose estimation play a fundamental role in semantic SLAM, which remain unsolved due to the lack of robust and accurate algorithms. In this work, we propose an ensemble data associate strategy for integrating the parametric and nonparametric statistic tests. By exploiting the nature of different statistics, our method can effectively aggregate the information of different measurements, and thus significantly improve the robustness and accuracy of data association. We then present an accurate object pose estimation framework, in which an outliers-robust centroid…
SKiD-SLAM: Robust, Lightweight, and Distributed Multi-Robot LiDAR SLAM in Resource-Constrained Field Environments
Dept. Electr. and Comput. Eng.（电子与计算机工程系）；Inha University（inha大学）；Laboratory for Information & Decision Systems (LIDS)（信息与决策系统实验室）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
University of Zurich（苏黎世大学）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）
Decentralized visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is a powerful tool for multi-robot applications in environments where absolute positioning systems are not available. Being visual, it relies on cameras, cheap, lightweight and versatile sensors, and being decentralized, it does not rely on communication to a central ground station. In this work, we integrate state-of-the-art decentralized SLAM components into a new, complete decentralized visual SLAM system. To allow for data association and co-optimization, existing decentralized visual SLAM systems regularly exchange the full…
Data association in SLAM is fundamentally challenging, and handling ambiguity well is crucial to achieve robust operation in real-world environments. When ambiguous measurements arise, conservatism often mandates that the measurement is discarded or a new landmark is initialized rather than risking an incorrect association. To address the inevitable `duplicate' landmarks that arise, we present an efficient map-merging framework to detect duplicate constellations of landmarks, providing a high-confidence loop-closure mechanism well-suited for object-level SLAM. This approach uses an incremental…
PAS-SLAM: A Visual SLAM System for Planar Ambiguous Scenes
School of Electronic Information and Electrical Engineering, Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学电子信息与电气工程学部）；Department of Automation, Tsinghua University（清华大学自动化系）；School of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Peking University（北京大学电子与计算机工程学院）；College of Information Science and Engineering, Northeastern University（东北大学信息科学与工程学院）
Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）
The majority of approaches for acquiring dense 3D environment maps with RGB-D cameras assumes static environments or rejects moving objects as outliers. The representation and tracking of moving objects, however, has significant potential for applications in robotics or augmented reality. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to dynamic SLAM with dense object-level representations. We represent rigid objects in local volumetric signed distance function (SDF) maps, and formulate multi-object tracking as direct alignment of RGB-D images with the SDF representations. Our main novelty is a pr…
University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学）；University of Texas at Dallas（德克萨斯大学达拉斯分校）；Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne（洛桑联邦理工学院）；Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）
With advances in image processing and machine learning, it is now feasible to incorporate semantic information into the problem of simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM). Previously, SLAM was carried out using lower level geometric features (points, lines, and planes) which are often view-point dependent and error prone in visually repetitive environments. Semantic information can improve the ability to recognise previously visited locations, as well as maintain sparser maps for long term SLAM applications. However, SLAM in repetitive environments has the critical problem of assigning me…
Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) systems are an essential component in agricultural robotics that enable autonomous navigation and the construction of accurate 3D maps of agricultural fields. However, lack of texture, varying illumination conditions, and lack of structure in the environment pose a challenge for Visual-SLAM systems that rely on traditional feature extraction and matching algorithms such as ORB or SIFT. This paper proposes 1) an object-level feature association algorithm that enables the creation of 3D reconstructions robustly by taking advantage of the struct…
We present a Bayesian object observation model for complete probabilistic semantic SLAM. Recent studies on object detection and feature extraction have become important for scene understanding and 3D mapping. However, 3D shape of the object is too complex to formulate the probabilistic observation model; therefore, performing the Bayesian inference of the object-oriented features as well as their pose is less considered. Besides, when the robot equipped with an RGB mono camera only observes the projected single view of an object, a significant amount of the 3D shape information is abandoned. D…
Automation and Systems Research Institute, Seoul National University（首尔国立大学自动化与系统研究所）
We present NOLBO, a variational observation model estimation for 3D multi-object from 2D single shot. Previous probabilistic instance-level understandings mainly consider the single-object image, not single shot with multi-object; relations between objects and the entire scene are out of their focus. The objectness of each observation also hardly join their model. Therefore, we propose a method to approximate the Bayesian observation model of scene-level 3D multi-object understanding. By exploiting variational auto-encoder (VAE), we estimate latent variables from the entire scene, which follow…
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）
Object SLAM uses additional semantic information to detect and map objects in the scene, in order to improve the system's perception and map representation capabilities. Quadrics and cubes are often used to represent objects, but their single shape limits the accuracy of object map and thus affects the application of downstream tasks. In this paper, we introduce superquadrics (SQ) with shape parameters into SLAM for representing objects, and propose a separate parameter estimation method that can accurately estimate object pose and adapt to different shapes. Furthermore, we present a lightweig…
CCDC Army Research Laboratory（美国陆军作战能力发展司令部陆军研究实验室）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Monash University（莫纳什大学）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）
Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) system typically employ vision-based sensors to observe the surrounding environment. However, the performance of such systems highly depends on the ambient illumination conditions. In scenarios with adverse visibility or in the presence of airborne particulates (e.g. smoke, dust, etc.), alternative modalities such as those based on thermal imaging and inertial sensors are more promising. In this paper, we propose the first complete thermal-inertial SLAM system which combines neural abstraction in the SLAM front end with robust pose graph optimizatio…
Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) frameworks for autonomous navigation rely on robust data association to identify loop closures for back-end trajectory optimization. In the case of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) equipped with multibeam echosounders (MBES), data association is particularly challenging due to the scarcity of identifiable landmarks in the seabed, the large drift in dead-reckoning navigation estimates to which AUVs are prone and the low resolution characteristic of MBES data. Deep learning solutions to loop closure detection have shown excellent performance on d…
Scene graphs represent the key components of a scene in a compact and semantically rich way, but are difficult to build during incremental SLAM operation because of the challenges of robustly identifying abstract scene elements and optimising continually changing, complex graphs. We present a distributed, graph-based SLAM framework for incrementally building scene graphs based on two novel components. First, we propose an incremental abstraction framework in which a neural network proposes abstract scene elements that are incorporated into the factor graph of a feature-based monocular SLAM sys…
We propose a novel Line based parameterization for category specific CAD models. The proposed parameterization associates 3D category-specific CAD model and object under consideration using a dictionary based RANSAC method that uses object Viewpoints as prior and edges detected in the respective intensity image of the scene. The association problem is posed as a classical Geometry problem rather than being dataset driven, thus saving the time and labour that one invests in annotating dataset to train Keypoint Network for different category objects. Besides eliminating the need of dataset prepa…
Automation and Systems Research Institute（自动化与系统研究所）；Seoul National University（首尔国立大学）
This paper presents a feature encoding method of complex 3D objects for high-level semantic features. Recent approaches to object recognition methods become important for semantic simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). However, there is a lack of consideration of the probabilistic observation model for 3D objects, as the shape of a 3D object basically follows a complex probability distribution. Furthermore, since the mobile robot equipped with a range sensor observes only a single view, much information of the object shape is discarded. These limitations are the major obstacles to seman…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Zhejiang University of Science & Technology（浙江科技学院）
This paper presents a 3D lidar SLAM system based on improved regionalized Gaussian process (GP) map reconstruction to provide both low-drift state estimation and mapping in real-time for robotics applications. We utilize spatial GP regression to model the environment. This tool enables us to recover surfaces including those in sparsely scanned areas and obtain uniform samples with uncertainty. Those properties facilitate robust data association and map updating in our scan-to-map registration scheme, especially when working with sparse range data. Compared with previous GP-SLAM, this work over…
Edinburgh Centre for Robotics（爱丁堡机器人中心）；Heriot-Watt University（赫瑞-瓦特大学）
Numerous Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithms have been presented in last decade using different sensor modalities. However, robust SLAM in extreme weather conditions is still an open research problem. In this paper, RadarSLAM, a full radar based graph SLAM system, is proposed for reliable localization and mapping in large-scale environments. It is composed of pose tracking, local mapping, loop closure detection and pose graph optimization, enhanced by novel feature matching and probabilistic point cloud generation on radar images. Extensive experiments are conducted on a pu…
Object-oriented SLAM is a popular technology in autonomous driving and robotics. In this paper, we propose a stereo visual SLAM with a robust quadric landmark representation method. The system consists of four components, including deep learning detection, object-oriented data association, dual quadric landmark initialization and object-based pose optimization. State-of-the-art quadric-based SLAM algorithms always face observation related problems and are sensitive to observation noise, which limits their application in outdoor scenes. To solve this problem, we propose a quadric initialization…
This paper presents normalizing flows for incremental smoothing and mapping (NF-iSAM), a novel algorithm for inferring the full posterior distribution in SLAM problems with nonlinear measurement models and non-Gaussian factors. NF-iSAM exploits the expressive power of neural networks, and trains normalizing flows to model and sample the full posterior. By leveraging the Bayes tree, NF-iSAM enables efficient incremental updates similar to iSAM2, albeit in the more challenging non-Gaussian setting. We demonstrate the advantages of NF-iSAM over state-of-the-art point and distribution estimation a…
FUSE: A Framework for Unified State Estimation in Vehicular and Robotic SLAM Systems
State Key Lab of Intelligent Green Vehicle and Mobility, Tsinghua University（智能绿色车辆与移动国家重点实验室，清华大学）；School of VM and College of AI, Tsinghua University（车辆学院与人工智能学院，清华大学）；SunRisingAI Ltd.（SunRisingAI有限公司）；China Intelligent and Connected Vehicles (Beijing) Research Institute Co., Ltd.（中国汽车智能互联车辆（北京）研究院有限公司）
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki（塞萨洛尼基亚里士多德大学）
Environment perception is a crucial ability for robot's interaction into an environment. One of the first steps in this direction is the combined problem of simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). A new method, called G-SLAM, is proposed, where the map is considered as a set of scattered points in the continuous space followed by a probability that states the existence of an obstacle in the subsequent point in space. A probabilistic approach with particle filters for the robot's pose estimation and an adaptive recursive algorithm for the map's probability distribution estimation is prese…
Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；University of Moratuwa（莫拉图瓦大学）
Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) has been richly researched in past years particularly with regard to range-based or visual-based sensors. Instead of deploying dedicated devices that use visual features, it is more pragmatic to exploit the radio features to achieve this task, due to their ubiquitous nature and the wide deployment of Wifi wireless network. In this paper, we present a novel approach for crowd-sensing simultaneous localization and radio fingerprint mapping (C-SLAM-RF) in large unknown indoor environments. The proposed system makes use of the received signal strength (…
Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；Brno University of Technology（布尔诺理工大学）
Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is a well-known estimation method used in many robotic and computer vision applications. Under Gaussian assumption, the MLE converts to a nonlinear least squares (NLS) problem. Efficient solutions to NLS exist and they are based on iteratively solving sparse linear systems until convergence. In general, the existing solutions provide only an estimation of the mean state vector, the resulting covariance being computationally too expensive to recover. Nevertheless, in many simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM) applications, knowing only the mean vector …
ARC Centre of Excellence for Robotic Vision（澳大利亚研究理事会机器人视觉卓越中心）；Queensland University of Technology（昆士兰科技大学）
Current approaches to object-oriented SLAM lack the ability to incorporate prior knowledge of the scene geometry, such as the expected global orientation of objects. We overcome this limitation by proposing a geometric factor that constrains the global orientation of objects in the map, depending on the objects' semantics. This new geometric factor is a first example of how semantics can inform and improve geometry in object-oriented SLAM. We implement the geometric factor for the recently proposed QuadricSLAM that represents landmarks as dual quadrics. The factor probabilistically models the …
Active SLAM is the task of actively planning robot paths while simultaneously building a map and localizing within. Existing work has focused on planning paths with occupancy grid maps, which do not scale well and suffer from long term drift. This work proposes a Topological Feature Graph (TFG) representation that scales well and develops an active SLAM algorithm with it. The TFG uses graphical models, which utilize independences between variables, and enables a unified quantification of exploration and exploitation gains with a single entropy metric. Hence, it facilitates a natural and princi…
Cheng Kar-Shun Robotics Institute, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学郑家纯机器人研究所）；Hong Kong Center for Construction Robotics（香港建筑机器人中心）
DATA61, CSIRO（联邦科学与工业研究组织DATA61）；Queensland University of Technology（昆士兰科技大学）
The concept of continuous-time trajectory representation has brought increased accuracy and efficiency to multi-modal sensor fusion in modern SLAM. However, regardless of these advantages, its offline property caused by the requirement of global batch optimization is critically hindering its relevance for real-time and life-long applications. In this paper, we present a dense map-centric SLAM method based on a continuous-time trajectory to cope with this problem. The proposed system locally functions in a similar fashion to conventional Continuous-Time SLAM (CT-SLAM). However, it removes the n…
Real-Time Indoor Object SLAM with LLM-Enhanced Priors
Students of Contextual Robotics Institute, University of California San Diego（情境机器人研究所研究生，加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；Faculty of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California San Diego（计算机科学与工程系 faculty，加州大学圣地亚哥分校）
The goal of this paper is to create a new framework for dense SLAM that is light enough for micro-robot systems based on depth camera and inertial sensor. Feature-based and direct methods are two mainstreams in visual SLAM. Both methods minimize photometric or reprojection error by iterative solutions, which are computationally expensive. To overcome this problem, we propose a non-iterative framework to reduce computational requirement. First, the attitude and heading reference system (AHRS) and axonometric projection are utilized to decouple the 6 Degree-of-Freedom (DoF) data, so that point c…
