Mobile robots navigating in indoor and outdoor environments must be able to identify and avoid unsafe terrain. Although a significant amount of work has been done on the detection of standing obstacles (solid obstructions), not much work has been done on the detection of negative obstacles (e.g. dropoffs, ledges, downward stairs). We propose a method of terrain safety segmentation using deep convolutional networks. Our custom semantic segmentation architecture uses a single camera as input and creates a freespace map distinguishing safe terrain and obstacles. We then show how this freespace map can be used for real-time navigation on an indoor robot. The results show that our system generalizes well, is suitable for real-time operation, and runs at around 55 fps on a small indoor robot powered by a low-power embedded GPU.
In the context of indoor and outdoor robot navigation, most development has been based on the use of LIDAR or depth-sensing cameras for localization and avoidance @cite_8 @cite_2 . These approaches create a pointcloud from data captured by the LIDAR or depth camera. This pointcloud is then used to build a costmap @cite_21 , which stores locations of obstacles and free space. Pathfinding algorithms can be used on this costmap to find a safe path for a robot to travel.
@cite_21 @cite_2 @cite_8
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Camera-based navigation within a given three-dimensional map enables heterogeneous robotic systems to share maps and use more abstract environment models like floor plans. This paper builds upon our previous work, and addresses the problem of how to combine 3D distance information from the map and the current visual image from the robot's camera in order to navigate within this map. The underlying assumption is that features which cause depth changes are also likely to create visual gradients. Based on this assumption, the similarity of visual image and depth images that are synthesized from the 3D map can be used to evaluate pose hypothesis. This paper integrates this idea into a Monte Carlo localization approach and additionally presents its application to path following. The presented approach is evaluated on a synthetic datasets that provides perfect knowledge of the ground truth, as well as two real-world datasets acquired by a heterogeneous robotic team: a proof-of-concept dataset in a scattered indoor environment, and a challenging corridor dataset. Visual robot navigation within large-scale, semistructured environments deals with various challenges such as computation intensive path planning algorithms or insufficient knowledge about traversable spaces. Moreover, many state-of-the-art navigation approaches only operate locally instead of gaining a more conceptual understanding of the planning objective. This limits the complexity of tasks a robot can accomplish and makes it harder to deal with uncertainties that are present in the context of real-time robotics applications. In this work, we present Topomap, a framework which simplifies the navigation task by providing a map to the robot which is tailored for path planning use. This novel approach transforms a sparse feature-based map from a visual Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) system into a three-dimensional topological map. This is done in two steps. First, we extract occupancy information directly from the noisy sparse point cloud. Then, we create a set of convex free-space clusters, which are the vertices of the topological map. We show that this representation improves the efficiency of global planning, and we provide a complete derivation of our algorithm. Planning experiments on real world datasets demonstrate that we achieve similar performance as RRT* with significantly lower computation times and storage requirements. Finally, we test our algorithm on a mobile robotic platform to prove its advantages. Visual robot navigation within large-scale, semi-structured environments deals with various challenges such as computation intensive path planning algorithms or insufficient knowledge about traversable spaces. Moreover, many state-of-the-art navigation approaches only operate locally instead of gaining a more conceptual understanding of the planning objective. This limits the complexity of tasks a robot can accomplish and makes it harder to deal with uncertainties that are present in the context of real-time robotics applications. In this work, we present Topomap, a framework which simplifies the navigation task by providing a map to the robot which is tailored for path planning use. This novel approach transforms a sparse feature-based map from a visual Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) system into a three-dimensional topological map. This is done in two steps. First, we extract occupancy information directly from the noisy sparse point cloud. Then, we create a set of convex free-space clusters, which are the vertices of the topological map. We show that this representation improves the efficiency of global planning, and we provide a complete derivation of our algorithm. Planning experiments on real world datasets demonstrate that we achieve similar performance as RRT* with significantly lower computation times and storage requirements. Finally, we test our algorithm on a mobile robotic platform to prove its advantages. We introduce a hybrid algorithm for the self-semantic location and autonomous navigation of robots using entropy-based vision and visual topological maps. In visual topological maps the visual landmarks are considered as leave points for guiding the robot to reach a target point (robot homing) in indoor environments. These visual landmarks are defined from images of relevant objects or characteristic scenes in the environment. The entropy of an image is directly related to the presence of a unique object or the presence of several different objects inside it: the lower the entropy the higher the probability of containing a single object inside it and, conversely, the higher the entropy the higher the probability of containing several objects inside it. Consequently, we propose the use of the entropy of images captured by the robot not only for the landmark searching and detection but also for obstacle avoidance. If the detected object corresponds to a landmark, the robot uses the suggestions stored in the visual topological map to reach the next landmark or to finish the mission. Otherwise, the robot considers the object as an obstacle and starts a collision avoidance maneuver. In order to validate the proposal we have defined an experimental framework in which the visual bug algorithm is used by an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) in typical indoor navigation tasks.