Congratulations to our BONN, ETHZ and TUD partners! We highlight each of the paper abstracts below. Full papers can be found on our Resources page.
Adaptive Robust Kernels for Non-Linear Least Squares Problems
Nived Chebrolu, Thomas La ̈be, Olga Vysotska, Jens Behley and Cyrill Stachniss
State estimation is a key ingredient in most robotic systems. Often, state estimation is performed using some form of least squares minimization. Basically, all error minimization procedures that work on real-world data use robust kernels as the standard way for dealing with outliers in the data. These kernels, however, are often hand-picked, sometimes in different combinations, and their parameters need to be tuned manually for a particular problem.
In this paper, we propose the use of a generalized robust kernel family, which is automatically tuned based on the distribution of the residuals and includes the common m-estimators. We tested our adaptive kernel with two popular estimation problems in robotics, namely ICP and bundle adjustment. The experiments presented in this paper suggest that our approach provides higher robustness while avoiding a manual tuning of the kernel parameters.
TSDF++: A Multi-Object Formulation for Dynamic Object Tracking and Reconstruction
Margarita Grinvald, Federico Tombari, Roland Siegwart and Juan Nieto
The ability to simultaneously track and reconstruct multiple objects moving in the scene is of the utmost importance for robotic tasks such as autonomous navigation and interaction.
Virtually all of the previous attempts to map multiple dynamic objects have evolved to store individual objects in separate reconstruction volumes and track the relative pose between them. While simple and intuitive, such formulation does not scale well with respect to the number of objects in the scene and introduces the need for an explicit occlusion handling strategy.
In contrast, we propose a map representation that allows maintaining a single volume for the entire scene and all the objects therein. To this end, we introduce a novel multi-object TSDF formulation that can encode multiple object surfaces at any given location in the map. In a multiple dynamic object tracking and reconstruction scenario, our representation allows maintaining accurate reconstruction of surfaces even while they become temporarily occluded by other objects moving in their proximity. We evaluate the proposed TSDF++ formulation on a public synthetic dataset and demonstrate its ability to preserve reconstructions of occluded surfaces when compared to the standard TSDF map representation.
A Unified Approach for Autonomous Volumetric Exploration of Large Scale Environments under Severe Odometry Drift
Lukas Schmid, Victor Reijgwart, Lionel Ott, Juan Nieto, Roland Siegwart and Cesar Cadena
Exploration is a fundamental problem in robot autonomy. A major limitation, however, is that during exploration robots oftentimes have to rely on on-board systems alone for state estimation, accumulating significant drift over time in large environments. Drift can be detrimental to robot safety and exploration performance. In this work, a submap-based, multi- layer approach for both mapping and planning is proposed to enable safe and efficient volumetric exploration of large scale environments despite odometry drift.
The central idea of our approach combines local (temporally and spatially) and global mapping to guarantee safety and efficiency. Similarly, our planning approach leverages the presented map to compute global volumetric frontiers in a changing global map and utilizes the nature of exploration dealing with partial information for efficient local and global planning. The presented system is thoroughly evaluated and shown to outperform state of the art methods even under drift-free conditions. Our system, termed GLocal, is made available open source.
Integrated Task Assignment and Path Planning for Capacitated Multi-Agent Pickup and Delivery
Zhe Chen, Javier Alonso-Mora, Xiaoshan Bai, Daniel D. Harabor and Peter J. Stuckey
Multi-agent Pickup and Delivery (MAPD) is a challenging industrial problem where a team of robots is tasked with transporting a set of tasks, each from an initial location and each to a specified target location. Appearing in the context of automated warehouse logistics and automated mail sortation, MAPD requires first deciding which robot is assigned what task (i.e., Task Assignment or TA) followed by a subsequent coordination problem where each robot must be assigned collision-free paths so as to successfully complete its assignment (i.e., Multi-Agent Path Finding or MAPF). Leading methods in this area solve MAPD sequentially: first assigning tasks, then assigning paths.
In this work we propose a new coupled method where task assignment choices are informed by actual delivery costs instead of by lower-bound estimates. The main ingredients of our approach are a marginal-cost assignment heuristic and a meta-heuristic improvement strategy based on Large Neighbourhood Search.
As a further contribution, we also consider a variant of the MAPD problem where each robot can carry multiple tasks instead of just one. Numerical simulations show that our approach yields efficient and timely solutions and we report significant improvement compared with other recent methods from the literature.
Where to go next: Learning a Subgoal Recommendation Policy for Navigation in Dynamic Environments
Bruno Brito, Michael Everett, Jonathan P. How and Javier Alonso-Mora
Robotic navigation in environments shared with other robots or humans remains challenging because the in- tentions of the surrounding agents are not directly observable and the environment conditions are continuously changing. Local trajectory optimization methods, such as model predictive control (MPC), can deal with those changes but require global guidance, which is not trivial to obtain in crowded scenarios.
This paper proposes to learn, via deep Reinforcement Learning (RL), an interaction-aware policy that provides long-term guidance to the local planner. In particular, in simulations with cooperative and non-cooperative agents, we train a deep network to recommend a subgoal for the MPC planner. The recommended subgoal is expected to help the robot in making progress towards its goal and accounts for the expected interaction with other agents. Based on the recommended subgoal, the MPC planner then optimizes the inputs for the robot satisfying its kino-dynamic and collision avoidance constraints.
Our approach is shown to substantially improve the navigation performance in terms of number of collisions as compared to prior MPC frameworks, and in terms of both travel time and number of collisions compared to deep RL methods in cooperative, competitive and mixed multiagent scenarios.
