In this paper, a complete framework for Autonomous Self Driving is implemented. LIDAR, Camera and IMU sensors are used together. The entire data communication is managed using Robot Operating System which provides a robust platform for implementation of Robotics Projects. Jetson Nano is used to provide powerful on-board processing capabilities. Sensor fusion is performed on the data received from the different sensors to improve the accuracy of the decision making and inferences that we derive from the data. This data is then used to create a localized map of the environment. In this step, the position of the vehicle is obtained with respect to the Mapping done using the sensor data.The different SLAM techniques used for this purpose are Hector Mapping and GMapping which are widely used mapping techniques in ROS. Apart from SLAM that primarily uses LIDAR data, Visual Odometry is implemented using a Monocular Camera. The sensor fused data is then used by Adaptive Monte Carlo Localization for car localization. Using the localized map developed, Path Planning techniques like "TEB planner" and "Dynamic Window Approach" are implemented for autonomous navigation of the vehicle. The last step in the Project is the implantation of Control which is the final decision making block in the pipeline that gives speed and steering data for the navigation that is compatible with Ackermann Kinematics. The implementation of such a control block under a ROS framework using the three sensors, viz, LIDAR, Camera and IMU is a novel approach that is undertaken in this project.
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Institute for Infocomm Research, A-STAR（新加坡科技研究局资讯通信研究院）
Localization can be achieved by different sensors and techniques such as a global positioning system (GPS), wifi, ultrasonic sensors, and cameras. In this paper, we focus on the laser-based localization method for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) applications in a GPS denied environment such as a deep tunnel system. Other than a low-cost 2D LiDAR for the planar axes, a single axis Lidar for the vertical axis as well as an inertial measurement unit (IMU) device is used to increase the reliability and accuracy of the localization performance. We present a comparative analysis of the three selected …
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
We present LINS, a lightweight lidar-inertial state estimator, for real-time ego-motion estimation. The proposed method enables robust and efficient navigation for ground vehicles in challenging environments, such as feature-less scenes, via fusing a 6-axis IMU and a 3D lidar in a tightly-coupled scheme. An iterated error-state Kalman filter (ESKF) is designed to correct the estimated state recursively by generating new feature correspondences in each iteration, and to keep the system computationally tractable. Moreover, we use a robocentric formulation that represents the state in a moving lo…
World Models for Autonomous Navigation of Terrestrial Robots from LIDAR Observations
Universidade Federal de Santa Maria, Brazil（巴西联邦大学圣玛利亚分校）；University of Tsukuba, Japan（日本筑波大学）；Universidade Federal de Rio Grande（巴西联邦大学里约格兰德分校）；Universidad Tecnológica del Uruguay, Uruguay（乌拉圭技术大学）
Inland-LOAM: Voxel-Based Structural Semantic LiDAR Odometry and Mapping for Inland Waterway Navigation
Division of Robotics, Automation and Mechatronics in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, KU Leuven（机械工程系机器人、自动化与机电系，KU莱顿大学）；Division of Declarative Languages and Artificial Intelligence (DTAI) in the Department of Computer Science, KU Leuven（计算机科学系声明语言与人工智能系（DTAI），KU莱顿大学）
University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies（多伦多大学航空航天研究所）；Apple Inc.（苹果公司）
We present a self-supervised learning approach for the semantic segmentation of lidar frames. Our method is used to train a deep point cloud segmentation architecture without any human annotation. The annotation process is automated with the combination of simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) and ray-tracing algorithms. By performing multiple navigation sessions in the same environment, we are able to identify permanent structures, such as walls, and disentangle short-term and long-term movable objects, such as people and tables, respectively. New sessions can then be performed using a…
LiDAR sensors are a powerful tool for robot simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) in unknown environments, but the raw point clouds they produce are dense, computationally expensive to store, and unsuited for direct use by downstream autonomy tasks, such as motion planning. For integration with motion planning, it is desirable for SLAM pipelines to generate lightweight geometric map representations. Such representations are also particularly well-suited for man-made environments, which can often be viewed as a so-called "Manhattan world" built on a Cartesian grid. In this work we presen…
Applications involving autonomous navigation and planning of mobile agents can benefit greatly by employing online Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) techniques, however, their proper implementation still warrants an efficient amalgamation with any offline path planning method that may be used for the particular application. In this paper, such a case of amalgamation is considered for a LiDAR-based indoor mapping system which presents itself as a 2D coverage path planning problem implemented along with online SLAM. This paper shows how classic offline Coverage Path Planning (CPP) can…
Learning Vision-Based Omnidirectional Navigation: A Teacher-Student Approach Using Monocular Depth Estimation
Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics（弗劳恩霍夫材料流与物流研究所）；The Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence（拉马尔人工智能与机器学习研究所）
EKF-Based Fusion of Wi-Fi/LiDAR/IMU for Indoor Localization and Navigation
School of Advanced Technology, Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University（西安交通大学利物浦大学先进技术学院）；Department of Electrical Engineering and Electronics, University of Liverpool（利物浦大学电子工程系）；Zhejiang University of Technology（浙江工业大学）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Suzhou Vocational Institute of Industrial Technology（苏州工业职业技术学院人工智能学院）
This paper presents a computationally efficient and robust LiDAR-inertial odometry framework. We fuse LiDAR feature points with IMU data using a tightly-coupled iterated extended Kalman filter to allow robust navigation in fast-motion, noisy or cluttered environments where degeneration occurs. To lower the computation load in the presence of large number of measurements, we present a new formula to compute the Kalman gain. The new formula has computation load depending on the state dimension instead of the measurement dimension. The proposed method and its implementation are tested in various …
University of Zagreb, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing（萨格勒布大学电气工程与计算学院）
This paper describes an application of the Cartographer graph SLAM stack as a pose sensor in a UAV feedback control loop, with certain application-specific changes in the SLAM stack such as smoothing of the optimized pose. Pose estimation is performed by fusing 3D LiDAR/IMU-based proprioception with GPS position measurements by means of pose graph optimisation. Moreover, partial environment maps built from the LiDAR data (submaps) within the Cartographer SLAM stack are marshalled into OctoMap, an Octree-based voxel map implementation. The OctoMap is further used for navigation tasks such as pa…
Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) based Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) has drawn increasing interests in autonomous driving. However, LiDAR-SLAM suffers from accumulating errors which can be significantly mitigated by Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS). Precise Point Positioning (PPP), an accurate GNSS operation mode independent of base stations, gains more popularity in unmanned systems. Considering the features of the two technologies, LiDAR-SLAM and PPP, this paper proposes a SLAM system, namely P3-LOAM (PPP based LiDAR Odometry and Mapping) which couples LiDAR-SLAM a…
Boosting LiDAR-Based Localization with Semantic Insight: Camera Projection versus Direct LiDAR Segmentation
Department of Technical Cognitive Systems, FZI Research Center for Information Technology（技术认知系统部门，信息技术研究所以暨创新中心）；Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)（卡尔斯鲁厄大学）
This paper presents an autonomous navigation system for ground robots traversing aggressive unstructured terrain through a cohesive arrangement of mapping, deliberative planning and reactive behaviour modules. All systems are aware of terrain slope, visibility and vehicle orientation, enabling robots to recognize, plan and react around unobserved areas and overcome negative obstacles, slopes, steps, overhangs and narrow passageways. This is one of pioneer works to explicitly and simultaneously couple mapping, planning and reactive components in dealing with negative obstacles. The system was d…
NUS Graduate School for Integrative Sciences and Engineering（新加坡国立大学综合科学与工程研究生院）
We propose to take a novel approach to robot system design where each building block of a larger system is represented as a differentiable program, i.e. a deep neural network. This representation allows for integrating algorithmic planning and deep learning in a principled manner, and thus combine the benefits of model-free and model-based methods. We apply the proposed approach to a challenging partially observable robot navigation task. The robot must navigate to a goal in a previously unseen 3-D environment without knowing its initial location, and instead relying on a 2-D floor map and vis…
Recent applications of deep learning to navigation have generated end-to-end navigation solutions whereby visual sensor input is mapped to control signals or to motion primitives. The resulting visual navigation strategies work very well at collision avoidance and have performance that matches traditional reactive navigation algorithms while operating in real-time. It is accepted that these solutions cannot provide the same level of performance as a global planner. However, it is less clear how such end-to-end systems should be integrated into a full navigation pipeline. We evaluate the typica…
In this paper, we look into the minimum obstacle displacement (MOD) planning problem from a mobile robot motion planning perspective. This problem finds an optimal path to goal by displacing movable obstacles when no path exists due to collision with obstacles. However this problem is computationally expensive and grows exponentially in the size of number of movable obstacles. This work looks into approximate solutions that are computationally less intensive and differ from the optimal solution by a factor of the optimal cost.
Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence（博世人工智能中心）；University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）
Solving robotic navigation tasks via reinforcement learning (RL) is challenging due to their sparse reward and long decision horizon nature. However, in many navigation tasks, high-level (HL) task representations, like a rough floor plan, are available. Previous work has demonstrated efficient learning by hierarchal approaches consisting of path planning in the HL representation and using sub-goals derived from the plan to guide the RL policy in the source task. However, these approaches usually neglect the complex dynamics and sub-optimal sub-goal-reaching capabilities of the robot during pla…
IIIT-Hyderabad（国际信息技术研究所海得拉巴分校）；The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
We embark on a hitherto unreported problem of an autonomous robot (self-driving car) navigating in dynamic scenes in a manner that reduces its localization error and eventual cumulative drift or Absolute Trajectory Error, which is pronounced in such dynamic scenes. With the hugely popular Velodyne-16 3D LIDAR as the main sensing modality, and the accurate LIDAR-based Localization and Mapping algorithm, LOAM, as the state estimation framework, we show that in the absence of a navigation policy, drift rapidly accumulates in the presence of moving objects. To overcome this, we learn actions that …
Department of Computer Science, George Mason University（计算机科学系，乔治·马歇尔大学）；Department of Engineering Science, University of South Florida（工程科学系，佛罗里达州立大学）
LiDAR odometry and mapping (LOAM) has been playing an important role in autonomous vehicles, due to its ability to simultaneously localize the robot's pose and build high-precision, high-resolution maps of the surrounding environment. This enables autonomous navigation and safe path planning of autonomous vehicles. In this paper, we present a robust, real-time LOAM algorithm for LiDARs with small FoV and irregular samplings. By taking effort on both front-end and back-end, we address several fundamental challenges arising from such LiDARs, and achieve better performance in both precision and e…
Autonomous Exploration Development Environment is an open-source repository released to facilitate the development of high-level planning algorithms and integration of complete autonomous navigation systems. The repository contains representative simulation environment models, fundamental navigation modules, e.g., local planner, terrain traversability analysis, waypoint following, and visualization tools. Together with two of our high-level planner releases -- TARE planner for exploration and FAR planner for route planning, we detail usage of the three open-source repositories and share experi…
Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory（美国陆军作战能力发展司令部陆军研究实验室）
A key challenge in fast ground robot navigation in 3D terrain is balancing robot speed and safety. Recent work has shown that 2.5D maps (2D representations with additional 3D information) are ideal for real-time safe and fast planning. However, the prevalent approach of generating 2D occupancy grids through raytracing makes the generated map unsafe to plan in, due to inaccurate representation of unknown space. Additionally, existing planners such as MPPI do not consider speeds in known free and unknown space separately, leading to slower overall plans. The RAMP pipeline proposed here solves th…
In this paper, we present a framework for real-time autonomous robot navigation based on cloud and on-demand databases to address two major issues of human-like robot interaction and task planning in global dynamic environment, which is not known a priori. Our framework contributes to make human-like brain GPS mapping system for robot using spatial information and performs 3D visual semantic SLAM for independent robot navigation. We accomplish the feat by separating robot's memory system into Long-Term Memory (LTM) and Short-Term Memory (STM). We also form robot's behavior and knowledge system…
