Traversability estimation in rugged, unstructured environments remains a challenging problem in field robotics. Often, the need for precise, accurate traversability estimation is in direct opposition to the limited sensing and compute capability present on affordable, small-scale mobile robots. To address this issue, we present a novel method to learn [u]ncertainty-aware [n]avigation features from high-fidelity scans of [real]-world environments (UNRealNet). This network can be deployed on-robot to predict these high-fidelity features using input from lower-quality sensors. UNRealNet predicts dense, metric-space features directly from single-frame lidar scans, thus reducing the effects of occlusion and odometry error. Our approach is label-free, and is able to produce traversability estimates that are robot-agnostic. Additionally, we can leverage UNRealNet's predictive uncertainty to both produce risk-aware traversability estimates, and refine our feature predictions over time. We find that our method outperforms traditional local mapping and inpainting baselines by up to 40%, and demonstrate its efficacy on multiple legged platforms.
Saint Petersburg State University（圣彼得堡国立大学）；University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学）
A single nonholonomic under-actuated mobile robot with a bounded control range travels in a 3D workspace. This workspace also hosts a compact unknown domain with a smooth boundary. The robot has access to the horizontal distance to this domain and to a certain direction (typically, vertical) in the space, along with its coordinate (typically, altitude) in this direction. We present a new navigation law that drives the robot to the desired distance to the domain and ensures subsequent full scan of its surface within a desired range of "altitudes". The proposed strategy is computationally inexpe…
AUSLUN: A Fixed-Hover UAV--USV System for GNSS-Denied Maritime Search and Navigation
School of Aerospace Engineering, Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学航空航天工程学院）；Khalifa University Center for Autonomous Robotic Systems (KUCARS), Khalifa University（哈利法大学自主机器人系统中心（KUCARS））
BIM-Discrepancy-Driven Active Sensing for Risk-Aware UAV-UGV Navigation
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA（电气与计算机工程系，加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA, USA（土木、建设与环境工程系，圣地亚哥州立大学）
This paper describes a system whereby a robot detects and track human-meaningful navigational cues as it navigates in an indoor environment. It is intended as the sensor front-end for a mobile robot system that can communicate its navigational context with human users. From simulated LiDAR scan data we construct a set of 2D occupancy grid bitmaps, then hand-label these with human-scale navigational features such as closed doors, open corridors and intersections. We train a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to recognize these features on input bitmaps. In our demonstration system, these featur…
The combination of data from multiple sensors, also known as sensor fusion or data fusion, is a key aspect in the design of autonomous robots. In particular, algorithms able to accommodate sensor fusion techniques enable increased accuracy, and are more resilient against the malfunction of individual sensors. The development of algorithms for autonomous navigation, mapping and localization have seen big advancements over the past two decades. Nonetheless, challenges remain in developing robust solutions for accurate localization in dense urban environments, where the so called last-mile delive…
Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague（捷克技术大学电气工程学院）
Autonomous operation of UAVs in a closed environment requires precise and reliable pose estimate that can stabilize the UAV without using external localization systems such as GNSS. In this work, we are concerned with estimating the pose from laser scans generated by an inexpensive and lightweight LIDAR. We propose a localization system for lightweight (under 200g) LIDAR sensors with high reliability in arbitrary environments, where other methods fail. The general nature of the proposed method allows deployment in wide array of applications. Moreover, seamless transitioning between different k…
University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies（多伦多大学航空航天研究所）
In order to tackle the challenge of unfavorable weather conditions such as rain and snow, radar is being revisited as a parallel sensing modality to vision and lidar. Recent works have made tremendous progress in applying spinning radar to odometry and place recognition. However, these works have so far ignored the impact of motion distortion and Doppler effects on spinning-radar-based navigation, which may be significant in the self-driving car domain where speeds can be high. In this work, we demonstrate the effect of these distortions on radar odometry using the Oxford Radar RobotCar Datase…
The demand for mobile robots has rapidly increased in recent years due to the flexibility and high variety of application fields comparing to static robots. To deal with complex tasks such as navigation, they work with high amounts of different sensor data making it difficult to operate with for non-experts. To enhance user understanding and human robot interaction, we propose an approach to visualize the navigation stack within a cutting edge 3D Augmented Reality device -- the Microsoft Hololens. Therefore, relevant navigation stack data including laser scan, environment map and path planing …
Noah’s Ark Lab, Huawei Technologies Canada, Ltd.（华为技术加拿大有限公司诺亚方舟实验室）；University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）
We propose a method to tackle the problem of mapless collision-avoidance navigation where humans are present using 2D laser scans. Our proposed method uses ego-safety to measure collision from the robot's perspective while social-safety to measure the impact of our robot's actions on surrounding pedestrians. Specifically, the social-safety part predicts the intrusion impact of our robot's action into the interaction area with surrounding humans. We train the policy using reinforcement learning on a simple simulator and directly evaluate the learned policy in Gazebo and real robot tests. Experi…
Real-Time Spatial Reasoning by Mobile Robots for Reconstruction and Navigation in Dynamic LiDAR Scenes
College of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Shenzhen University（深圳大学计算机科学与软件工程学院）；School of Computer Science, University of Guelph（圭尔夫大学计算机科学学院）；School of Computing Science, Simon Fraser University（西蒙弗雷泽大学计算机科学学院）
CIDETEC, Instituto Politécnico Nacional（国立理工学院CIDETEC）；ESIME-Azc, Instituto Politécnico Nacional（国立理工学院ESIME阿兹卡波特萨尔科校区）
This paper presents a new chaotic system having four attractors, including two fixed point attractors and two symmetrical chaotic strange attractors. Dynamical properties of the system, viz. sensitive dependence on initial conditions, Lyapunov spectrum, strangeness measure, attraction basin, including the class and size of it, existence of strange attractor, bifurcation analysis, multistability, electronic circuit design, and hardware implementation, are rigorously treated. Numerical computations are used to compute the basin of attraction and show that the system has a far-reaching composite …
The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Army Research Laboratory（陆军研究实验室）；Google（谷歌）
Social navigation is the capability of an autonomous agent, such as a robot, to navigate in a 'socially compliant' manner in the presence of other intelligent agents such as humans. With the emergence of autonomously navigating mobile robots in human populated environments (e.g., domestic service robots in homes and restaurants and food delivery robots on public sidewalks), incorporating socially compliant navigation behaviors on these robots becomes critical to ensuring safe and comfortable human robot coexistence. To address this challenge, imitation learning is a promising framework, since …
CeRLP: A Cross-embodiment Robot Local Planning Framework for Visual Navigation
School of Computer Science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, P. R. China（上海交通大学计算机科学学院，上海，中华人民共和国）；College of Information Science and Technology, Eastern Institute of Technology, Ningbo, P. R. China（信息科学与技术学院，东部技术研究所，宁波，中华人民共和国）
Autonomous Navigation of an Ultrasound Probe Towards Standard Scan Planes with Deep Reinforcement Learning
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Shenzhen University（深圳大学）；Sonoscape Medical Corp.（开立医疗）；Peking University Shenzhen Hospital（北京大学深圳医院）；Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；Shenzhen Research Institute of the Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学深圳研究院）
Democritus University of Thrace（色雷斯德谟克利特大学）；Aalborg University（奥尔堡大学）
Mobile robots dedicated in security tasks should be capable of clearly perceiving their environment to competently navigate within cluttered areas, so as to accomplish their assigned mission. The paper in hand describes such an autonomous agent designed to deploy competently in hazardous environments equipped with a laser scanner sensor. During the robot's motion, consecutive scans are obtained to produce dense 3D maps of the area. A 3D point cloud registration technique is exploited to merge the successively created maps during the robot's motion followed by an ICP refinement step. The recons…
The benefit of pretrained autoencoders for reinforcement learning in comparison to training on raw observations is already known [1]. In this paper, we address the generation of a compact and information-rich state representation. In particular, we train a variational autoencoder for 2D-lidar scans to use its latent state for reinforcement learning of navigation tasks. To achieve high reconstruction power of our autoencoding pipeline, we propose an - in the context of autoencoding 2D-lidar scans - novel preprocessing into a local binary occupancy image. This has no additional requirements, nei…
AgniNav: Configuration-Driven Cross-Embodiment Local Planning for Robot Navigation
Eastern Institute of Technology, Ningbo, China（东方理工（宁波））；University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK（诺丁汉大学）；University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China（中国科学技术大学）
Autonomous Navigation of Quadrupeds Using Coverage Path Planning with Morphological Skeleton Map
Department of Cognitive Robotics, ME, Delft University of Technology（认知机器人系，代尔夫特理工大学）；Department of Microelectronics, EEMCS, Delft University of Technology（微电子系，代尔夫特理工大学）
Moving in dynamic pedestrian environments is one of the important requirements for autonomous mobile robots. We present a model-based reinforcement learning approach for robots to navigate through crowded environments. The navigation policy is trained with both real interaction data from multi-agent simulation and virtual data from a deep transition model that predicts the evolution of surrounding dynamics of mobile robots. The model takes laser scan sequence and robot's own state as input and outputs steering control. The laser sequence is further transformed into stacked local obstacle maps …
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)（韩国科学技术院）；LIG Nex1 Co. Ltd.（LIG Nex1有限公司）
Perception of traversable regions and objects of interest from a 3D point cloud is one of the critical tasks in autonomous navigation. A ground vehicle needs to look for traversable terrains that are explorable by wheels. Then, to make safe navigation decisions, the segmentation of objects positioned on those terrains has to be followed up. However, over-segmentation and under-segmentation can negatively influence such navigation decisions. To that end, we propose TRAVEL, which performs traversable ground detection and object clustering simultaneously using the graph representation of a 3D poi…
School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, The University of Queensland（昆士兰大学电气工程与计算机科学学院）；CSIRO Robotics, Data61（联邦科学与工业研究组织机器人学与Data61研究院）
University of Bonn（波恩大学）；Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence（拉玛尔机器学习与人工智能研究所）
Collision-free, goal-directed navigation in environments containing unknown static and dynamic obstacles is still a great challenge, especially when manual tuning of navigation policies or costly motion prediction needs to be avoided. In this paper, we therefore propose a subgoal-driven hierarchical navigation architecture that is trained with deep reinforcement learning and decouples obstacle avoidance and motor control. In particular, we separate the navigation task into the prediction of the next subgoal position for avoiding collisions while moving toward the final target position, and the…
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Advanced Remanufacturing and Technology Centre（先进再制造与技术中心）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
This paper studies how to improve the generalization performance and learning speed of the navigation agents trained with deep reinforcement learning (DRL). Although DRL exhibits huge potential in robot mapless navigation, DRL agents performing well in training scenarios are often found to perform poorly in unfamiliar scenarios. In this work, we propose that the representation of LiDAR readings is a key factor behind the degradation of agents' performance and present a powerful input pre-processing (IP) approach to address this issue. As this approach uses adaptively parametric reciprocal func…
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Dartmouth College（达特茅斯学院）
Underwater navigation presents several challenges, including unstructured unknown environments, lack of reliable localization systems (e.g., GPS), and poor visibility. Furthermore, good-quality obstacle detection sensors for underwater robots are scant and costly; and many sensors like RGB-D cameras and LiDAR only work in-air. To enable reliable mapless underwater navigation despite these challenges, we propose a low-cost end-to-end navigation system, based on a monocular camera and a fixed single-beam echo-sounder, that efficiently navigates an underwater robot to waypoints while avoiding nea…
We propose a novel method for autonomous legged robot navigation in densely vegetated environments with a variety of pliable/traversable and non-pliable/untraversable vegetation. We present a novel few-shot learning classifier that can be trained on a few hundred RGB images to differentiate flora that can be navigated through, from the ones that must be circumvented. Using the vegetation classification and 2D lidar scans, our method constructs a vegetation-aware traversability cost map that accurately represents the pliable and non-pliable obstacles with lower, and higher traversability costs,…
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Institute for Infocomm Research, Agency for Science, Technology and Research（新加坡科技研究局资讯通信研究院）
Tactile sensors have been introduced to a wide range of robotic tasks such as robot manipulation to mimic the sense of human touch. However, there has only been a few works that integrate tactile sensing into robot navigation. This paper describes a navigation system which allows robots to operate in crowded human-dense environments and behave with socially acceptable reactions by utilizing semantic and force information collected by embedded tactile sensors, RGB-D camera and LiDAR. Compliance control is implemented based on artificial potential fields considering not only laser scan but also …
AR Forcing: Towards Long-Horizon Robot Navigation World Model
Institute for AI Industry Research, Tsinghua University（清华大学人工智能产业研究院）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；School of Safety Science, Tsinghua University（清华大学安全科学学院）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Lenovo, Beijing, China（北京联想公司）
Place recognition is a key module in robotic navigation. The existing line of studies mostly focuses on visual place recognition to recognize previously visited places solely based on their appearance. In this paper, we address structural place recognition by recognizing a place based on structural appearance, namely from range sensors. Extending our previous work on a rotation invariant spatial descriptor, the proposed descriptor completes a generic descriptor robust to both rotation (heading) and translation when roll-pitch motions are not severe. We introduce two sub-descriptors and enable …
We propose an algorithm to (i) learn online a deep signed distance function (SDF) with a LiDAR-equipped robot to represent the 3D environment geometry, and (ii) plan collision-free trajectories given this deep learned map. Our algorithm takes a stream of incoming LiDAR scans and continually optimizes a neural network to represent the SDF of the environment around its current vicinity. When the SDF network quality saturates, we cache a copy of the network, along with a learned confidence metric, and initialize a new SDF network to continue mapping new regions of the environment. We then concate…
STONE Dataset: A Scalable Multi-Modal Surround-View 3D Traversability Dataset for Off-Road Robot Navigation
Interdisciplinary Program in Artificial Intelligence, Seoul National University（人工智能交叉学科项目，首尔国立大学）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Seoul National University（电气与计算机工程系，首尔国立大学）
Luleå University of Technology（吕勒奥理工大学）；University of Massachusetts Lowell（马萨诸塞大学洛厄尔分校）；Jet Propulsion Laboratory California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院喷气推进实验室）；California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院）
This article proposes a novel Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) framework for Micro Aerial Vehicle (MAV) autonomous navigation in constrained environments. The introduced framework allows us to consider the nonlinear dynamics of MAVs and guarantees real-time performance. Our first contribution is to design a computationally efficient subspace clustering method to reveal from geometrical constraints to underlying constraint planes within a 3D point cloud, obtained from a 3D lidar scanner. The second contribution of our work is to incorporate the extracted information into the nonlinear …
Indian Institute of Science（印度科学研究所）；AMIDC Pvt Ltd（AMIDC私人有限公司）；Chennai Mathematical Institute（钦奈数学研究所）
Accurate reconstruction of static environments from LiDAR scans of scenes containing dynamic objects, which we refer to as Dynamic to Static Translation (DST), is an important area of research in Autonomous Navigation. This problem has been recently explored for visual SLAM, but to the best of our knowledge no work has been attempted to address DST for LiDAR scans. The problem is of critical importance due to wide-spread adoption of LiDAR in Autonomous Vehicles. We show that state-of the art methods developed for the visual domain when adapted for LiDAR scans perform poorly. We develop DSLR, a…
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）
Learned Neural Network based policies have shown promising results for robot navigation. However, most of these approaches fall short of being used on a real robot due to the extensive simulated training they require. These simulations lack the visuals and dynamics of the real world, which makes it infeasible to deploy on a real robot. We present a novel Neural Net based policy, NavNet, which allows for easy deployment on a real robot. It consists of two sub policies -- a high level policy which can understand real images and perform long range planning expressed in high level commands; a low …
