In this paper, we propose a new learning scheme for generating geometric correspondences to be used for visual odometry. A convolutional neural network (CNN) combined with a recurrent neural network (RNN) are trained together to detect the location of keypoints as well as to generate corresponding descriptors in one unified structure. The network is optimized by warping points from source frame to reference frame, with a rigid body transform. Essentially, learning from warping. The overall training is focused on movements of the camera rather than movements within the image, which leads to better consistency in the matching and ultimately better motion estimation. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves better results than both related deep learning and hand crafted methods. Furthermore, as a demonstration of the promise of our method we use a naive SLAM implementation based on these keypoints and get a performance on par with ORB-SLAM.

In this article we present and evaluate a system which allows a mobile robot to autonomously detect, model and re-recognize objects in everyday environments. Whilst other systems have demonstrated one of these elements, to our knowledge we present the first system which is capable of doing all of these things, all without human interaction, in normal indoor scenes. Our system detects objects to learn by modelling the static part of the environment and extracting dynamic elements. It then creates and executes a view plan around a dynamic element to gather additional views for learning. Finally these views are fused to create an object model. The performance of the system is evaluated on publicly available datasets as well as on data collected by the robot in both controlled and uncontrolled scenarios.

We present a system for creating object models from RGB-D views acquired autonomously by a mobile robot. We create high-quality textured meshes of the objects by approximating the underlying geometry with a Poisson surface. Our system employs two optimization steps, first registering the views spatially based on image features, and second aligning the RGB images to maximize photometric consistency with respect to the reconstructed mesh. We show that the resulting models can be used robustly for recognition by training a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) on images rendered from the reconstructed meshes. We perform experiments on data collected autonomously by a mobile robot both in controlled and uncontrolled scenarios. We compare quantitatively and qualitatively to previous work to validate our approach.

We present a system for creating object modelsfrom RGB-D views acquired autonomously by a mobile robot.We create high-quality textured meshes of the objects byapproximating the underlying geometry with a Poisson surface.Our system employs two optimization steps, first registering theviews spatially based on image features, and second aligningthe RGB images to maximize photometric consistency withrespect to the reconstructed mesh. We show that the resultingmodels can be used robustly for recognition by training aConvolutional Neural Network (CNN) on images rendered fromthe reconstructed meshes. We perform experiments on datacollected autonomously by a mobile robot both in controlledand uncontrolled scenarios. We compare quantitatively andqualitatively to previous work to validate our approach.

We present a novel method for efficient querying and retrieval of arbitrarily shaped objects from large amounts of unstructured 3D point cloud data. Our approach first performs a convex segmentation of the data after which local features are extracted and stored in a feature dictionary. We show that the representation allows efficient and reliable querying of the data. To handle arbitrarily shaped objects, we propose a scheme which allows incremental matching of segments based on similarity to the query object. Further, we adjust the feature metric based on the quality of the query results to improve results in a second round of querying. We perform extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments on two datasets for both segmentation and retrieval, validating the results using ground truth data. Comparison with other state of the art methods further enforces the validity of the proposed method. Finally, we also investigate how the density and distribution of the local features within the point clouds influence the quality of the results.

In this paper, we present an object based approach for human-centric partitioning of the environment. Our approach for determining the human-centric regionsis to detect the objects that are commonly associated withfrequent human presence. In order to detect these objects, we employ state of the art perception techniques. The detected objects are stored with their spatio-temporal information inthe robot’s memory to be later used for generating the regions.The advantages of our method is that it is autonomous, requires only a small set of perceptual data and does not even require people to be present while generating the regions.The generated regions are validated using a 1-month dataset collected in an indoor office environment. The experimental results show that although a small set of perceptual data isused, the regions are generated at densely occupied locations.

We introduce the antiparticle filter, AF, a new type of recursive Bayesian estimator that is unlike either the extended Kalman Filter, EKF, unscented Kalman Filter, UKF or the particle filter PF. We show that for a classic problem of robot localization the AF can substantially outperform these other filters in some situations. The AF estimates the posterior distribution as an auxiliary variable Gaussian which gives an analytic formula using no random samples. It adaptively changes the complexity of the posterior distribution as the uncertainty changes. It is equivalent to the EKF when the uncertainty is low while being able to represent non-Gaussian distributions as the uncertainty increases. The computation time can be much faster than a particle filter for the same accuracy. We have simulated comparisons of two types of AF to the EKF, the iterative EKF, the UKF, an iterative UKF, and the PF demonstrating that AF can reduce the error to a consistent accurate value.

This paper presents a novel method for classifying regions from human movements in service robots' working environments. The entire space is segmented subject to the class type according to the functionality or affordance of each place which accommodates a typical human behavior. This is achieved based on a grid map in two steps. First a probabilistic model is developed to capture human movements for each grid cell by using a non-ergodic HMM. Then the learned transition probabilities corresponding to these movements are used to cluster all cells by using the K-means algorithm. The knowledge of typical human movements for each location, represented by the prototypes from K-means and summarized in a ‘behavior-based map’, enables a robot to adjust the strategy of interacting with people according to where they are located, and thus greatly enhances its capability to assist people. The performance of the proposed classification method is demonstrated by experimental results from 8 hours of data that are collected in a kitchen environment.

In this work we address the problem of dynamic object segmentation in office environments. We make no prior assumptions on what is dynamic and static, and our reasoning is based on change detection between sparse and non-uniform observations of the scene. We model the static part of the environment, and we focus on improving the accuracy and quality of the segmented dynamic objects over long periods of time. We address the issue of adapting the static structure over time and incorporating new elements, for which we train and use a classifier whose output gives an indication of the dynamic nature of the segmented elements. We show that the proposed algorithms improve the accuracy and the rate of detection of dynamic objects by comparing with a labelled dataset.