Visually poor scenarios are one of the main sources of failure in visual localization systems in outdoor environments. To address this challenge, we present MOZARD, a multi-modal localization system for urban outdoor environments using vision and LiDAR. By extending our preexisting key-point based visual multi-session local localization approach with the use of semantic data, an improved localization recall can be achieved across vastly different appearance conditions. In particular we focus on the use of curbstone information because of their broad distribution and reliability within urban environments. We present thorough experimental evaluations on several driving kilometers in challenging urban outdoor environments, analyze the recall and accuracy of our localization system and demonstrate in a case study possible failure cases of each subsystem. We demonstrate that MOZARD is able to bridge scenarios where our previous work VIZARD fails, hence yielding an increased recall performance, while a similar localization accuracy of 0.2m is achieved
ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Sevensense Robotics AG（Sevensense机器人公司）
Changes in appearance is one of the main sources of failure in visual localization systems in outdoor environments. To address this challenge, we present VIZARD, a visual localization system for urban outdoor environments. By combining a local localization algorithm with the use of multi-session maps, a high localization recall can be achieved across vastly different appearance conditions. The fusion of the visual localization constraints with wheel-odometry in a state estimation framework further guarantees smooth and accurate pose estimates. In an extensive experimental evaluation on several…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are becoming largely ubiquitous with an increasing demand for aerial data. Accurate navigation and localization, required for precise data collection in many industrial applications, often relies on RTK GNSS. These systems, able of centimeter-level accuracy, require a setup and calibration process and are relatively expensive. This paper addresses the problem of accurate positioning and navigation of UAVs through cooperative localization. Inexpensive ultra-wideband (UWB) transceivers installed on both the UAV and a support ground robot enable centimeter-level re…
Indian Institute of Science（印度科学学院）；National Institute of Technology, Srinagar（斯利那加国立理工学院）
In the modern era of automation and robotics, autonomous vehicles are currently the focus of academic and industrial research. With the ever increasing number of unmanned aerial vehicles getting involved in activities in the civilian and commercial domain, there is an increased need for autonomy in these systems too. Due to guidelines set by the governments regarding the operation ceiling of civil drones, road-tracking based navigation is garnering interest . In an attempt to achieve the above mentioned tasks, we propose an imitation learning based, data-driven solution to UAV autonomy for nav…
NavAgent: Multi-scale Urban Street View Fusion For UAV Embodied Vision-and-Language Navigation
Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院空天信息创新研究院）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；School of Electronic, Electrical and Communication Engineering, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学电子电气与通信工程学院）
Autonomous Driving in Unstructured Environments: How Far Have We Come?
Research Center for Intelligent Computing Systems, SKLP, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（智能计算系统研究中心、SKLP、计算技术研究所、中国科学院）；Harbin Engineering University（哈尔滨工程大学）；Jianghuai Advance Technology Center, Anhui Provincial Key Laboratory of Humanoid Robot, Anhui Provincial Industry Innovation Center of Humanoid Robot（江淮先进技术中心、安徽省人形机器人重点实验室、安徽省人形机器人产业创新中心）；Beihang University（北航）；Test Center, National University of Defense Technology（测试中心、国防科技大学）；National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）；Unmanned Systems Technology Research Center, Defense Innovation Institute（无人系统技术研究中心、创新研究院）
University of Bologna（博洛尼亚大学）；VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd（芬兰国家技术研究中心）
A measurement setup made of millimeter-wave and ultra wideband transceivers mounted on both a customized UAV and a ground station for full 3D wireless propagation analysis is described in this work. The developed system represents a flexible solution for the characterization of wireless channels and especially of urban propagation, as the drone might be easily located almost anywhere from ground level to the buildings rooftop and beyond. The double directional properties of the channel can be achieved by rotating directive antennas at the link ends. Other possible applications in urban context…
Meridian: Metric-Semantic Primitive Matching for Cross-View Geo-Localization Beyond Urban Environments
Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；GRASP Laboratory, University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学GRASP实验室）；U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command, Army Research Laboratory（美国陆军战斗能力发展指挥部，陆军研究实验室）
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Google（谷歌）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）
Outdoor navigation on sidewalks in urban environments is the key technology behind important human assistive applications, such as last-mile delivery or neighborhood patrol. This paper aims to develop a quadruped robot that follows a route plan generated by public map services, while remaining on sidewalks and avoiding collisions with obstacles and pedestrians. We devise a two-staged learning framework, which first trains a teacher agent in an abstract world with privileged ground-truth information, and then applies Behavior Cloning to teach the skills to a student agent who only has access to…
For autonomous robots navigating in urban environments, it is important for the robot to stay on the designated path of travel (i.e., the footpath), and avoid areas such as grass and garden beds, for safety and social conformity considerations. This paper presents an autonomous navigation approach for unknown urban environments that combines the use of semantic segmentation and LiDAR data. The proposed approach uses the segmented image mask to create a 3D obstacle map of the environment, from which, the boundaries of the footpath is computed. Compared to existing methods, our approach does not…
In unstructured urban canals, regulation-aware interactions with other vessels are essential for collision avoidance and social compliance. In this paper, we propose a regulations aware motion planning framework for Autonomous Surface Vessels (ASVs) that accounts for dynamic and static obstacles. Our method builds upon local model predictive contouring control (LMPCC) to generate motion plans satisfying kino-dynamic and collision constraints in real-time while including regulation awareness. To incorporate regulations in the planning stage, we propose a cost function encouraging compliance wit…
Real-World Deployment of Cloud-based Autonomous Mobility Systems for Outdoor and Indoor Environments
Department of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering, University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学机械与机电工程系）；Technology Partnerships and Innovations, Rogers Communications, Canada Inc.（罗杰斯通讯加拿大有限公司技术伙伴关系与创新部）；Mechanical Engineering Department, University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学机械工程系）
Active Loop Closure for OSM-guided Robotic Mapping in Large-Scale Urban Environments
University of Macau（澳门大学）；State Key Laboratory of Internet of Things for Smart City (SKL-IOTSC)（智慧城市物联网国家重点实验室）；Faculty of Science and Technology（科技学院）
Accurate smartphone-based outdoor localization system in deep urban canyons are increasingly needed for various IoT applications such as augmented reality, intelligent transportation, etc. The recently developed feature-based visual positioning system (VPS) by Google detects edges from smartphone images to match with pre-surveyed edges in their map database. As smart cities develop, the building information modeling (BIM) becomes widely available, which provides an opportunity for a new semantic-based VPS. This article proposes a novel 3D city model and semantic-based VPS for accurate and robu…
Multi-modal panoramic 3D outdoor datasets for place categorization
Graduate School of Information Science and Electrical Engineering, Kyushu University（九州大学信息科学与电子工程研究生院）；Polytechnic University of Cartagena (UPCT)（卡塔赫纳理工学院）；Faculty of Information Science and Electrical Engineering, Kyushu University（九州大学信息科学与电子工程学系）
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology（韩国科学技术院）；NAVER LABS（NAVER实验室）
Global registration using 3D point clouds is a crucial technology for mobile platforms to achieve localization or manage loop-closing situations. In recent years, numerous researchers have proposed global registration methods to address a large number of outlier correspondences. Unfortunately, the degeneracy problem, which represents the phenomenon in which the number of estimated inliers becomes lower than three, is still potentially inevitable. To tackle the problem, a degeneracy-robust decoupling-based global registration method is proposed, called Quatro. In particular, our method employs …
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Visual-Inertial odometry (VIO) is known to suffer from drifting especially over long-term runs. In this paper, we present GVINS, a non-linear optimization based system that tightly fuses GNSS raw measurements with visual and inertial information for real-time and drift-free state estimation. Our system aims to provide accurate global 6-DoF estimation under complex indoor-outdoor environment where GNSS signals may be intermittent or even totally unavailable. To connect global measurements with local states, a coarse-to-fine initialization procedure is proposed to efficiently calibrate the trans…
PRISM-Loc: a Lightweight Long-range LiDAR Localization in Urban Environments with Topological Maps
Federal Research Center for Computer Science and Control of Russian Academy of Sciences（俄罗斯科学院计算机科学与控制联邦研究中心）；Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT)（莫斯科物理技术学院）；Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (AIRI)（人工智能研究所）；Innopolis University（Innopolis大学）
MUSON: A Reasoning-oriented Multimodal Dataset for Socially Compliant Navigation in Urban Environments
Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, Hokkaido University（北海道大学信息科学研究生院）；Graduate School of Computer Science, George Mason University（乔治·马歇尔大学计算机科学研究生院）
