Registering accurately point clouds from a cheap low-resolution sensor is a challenging task. Existing rigid registration methods failed to use the physical 3D uncertainty distribution of each point from a real sensor in the dynamic alignment process mainly because the uncertainty model for a point is static and invariant and it is hard to describe the change of these physical uncertainty models in the registration process. Additionally, the existing Gaussian mixture alignment architecture cannot be efficiently implement these dynamic changes. This paper proposes a simple architecture combining error estimation from sample covariances and dual dynamic global probability alignment using the convolution of uncertainty-based Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM) from point clouds. Firstly, we propose an efficient way to describe the change of each 3D uncertainty model, which represents the structure of the point cloud much better. Unlike the invariant GMM (representing a fixed point cloud) in traditional Gaussian mixture alignment, we use two uncertainty-based GMMs that change and interact with each other in each iteration. In order to have a wider basin of convergence than other local algorithms, we design a more robust energy function by convolving efficiently the two GMMs over the whole 3D space. Tens of thousands of trials have been conducted on hundreds of models from multiple datasets to demonstrate the proposed method's superior performance compared with the current state-of-the-art methods. The new dataset and code is available from this https URL
Robotics: Science and Systems III spans a wide spectrum of robotics, bringing together researchers working on the foundations of robotics, robotics applications, and analysis of robotics systems. This volume presents the proceedings of the third annual Robotics: Science and Systems conference, held in June 2007 at Georgia Tech. Papers report state-of-the-art research on topics as diverse as Legged Robotics, Reconfigurable Robots, Biomimetic Robots, Manipulation, Humanoid Robotics, Telerobotics, Haptics, Motion Planning, Collision Avoidance, Robot Vision and Perception, Bayesian Techniques, Machine Learning, Mobile Robots, and Multi-robot systems. This conference reflects not only the tremendous growth of robotics as a discipline but also the desire in the robotics community for a flagship event at which the best of the research in the field can be presented. The authors describe a general-purpose, representation-independent method for the accurate and computationally efficient registration of 3-D shapes including free-form curves and surfaces. The method handles the full six degrees of freedom and is based on the iterative closest point (ICP) algorithm, which requires only a procedure to find the closest point on a geometric entity to a given point. The ICP algorithm always converges monotonically to the nearest local minimum of a mean-square distance metric, and the rate of convergence is rapid during the first few iterations. Therefore, given an adequate set of initial rotations and translations for a particular class of objects with a certain level of 'shape complexity', one can globally minimize the mean-square distance metric over all six degrees of freedom by testing each initial registration. One important application of this method is to register sensed data from unfixtured rigid objects with an ideal geometric model, prior to shape inspection. Experimental results show the capabilities of the registration algorithm on point sets, curves, and surfaces. > Despite the fact that original Iterative Closest Point(ICP) algorithm has been widely used for registration, itcannot tackle the problem when two point clouds are par-tially overlapping. Accordingly, this paper proposes a ro-bust approach for the registration of partially overlappingpoint clouds. Given two initially posed clouds, it firstlybuilds up bilateral correspondence and computes bidirec-tional distances for each point in the data shape. Based onthe ratio of bidirectional distances, the exponential functionis selected and utilized to calculate the probability value,which can indicate whether the point pair belongs to theoverlapping part or not. Subsequently, the probability val-ue can be embedded into the least square function for reg-istration of partially overlapping point clouds and a novelvariant of ICP algorithm is presented to obtain the optimalrigid transformation. The proposed approach can achievegood registration of point clouds, even when their overlappercentage is low. Experimental results tested on public da-ta sets illustrate its superiority over previous approaches onrobustness. Many modern sensors used for mapping produce 3D point clouds, which are typically registered together using the iterative closest point (ICP) algorithm. Because ICP has many variants whose performances depend on the environment and the sensor, hundreds of variations have been published. However, no comparison frameworks are available, leading to an arduous selection of an appropriate variant for particular experimental conditions. The first contribution of this paper consists of a protocol that allows for a comparison between ICP variants, taking into account a broad range of inputs. The second contribution is an open-source ICP library, which is fast enough to be usable in multiple real-world applications, while being modular enough to ease comparison of multiple solutions. This paper presents two examples of these field applications. The last contribution is the comparison of two baseline ICP variants using data sets that cover a rich variety of environments. Besides demonstrating the need for improved ICP methods for natural, unstructured and information-deprived environments, these baseline variants also provide a solid basis to which novel solutions could be compared. The combination of our protocol, software, and baseline results demonstrate convincingly how open-source software can push forward the research in mapping and navigation. 