Publications

This letter introduces Wolf , a C++ estimation framework based on factor graphs and targeted at mobile robotics. Wolf can be used beyond SLAM to handle self-calibration, model identification, or the observation of dynamic quantities other than localization. The architecture of Wolf allows for a modular yet tightly-coupled estimator. Modularity is enhanced via reusable plugins that are loaded at runtime depending on application setup. This setup is achieved conveniently through YAML files, allowing users to configure a wide range of applications without the need of writing or compiling code. Most procedures are coded as abstract algorithms in base classes with varying levels of specialization. Overall, all these assets allow for coherent processing and favor code re-usability and scalability. Wolf can be used with ROS , and is made publicly available and open to collaboration.

This paper proposes the use of piecewise C^n smooth curve for mobile-base motion planning and control, coined Timed-Elastic Smooth Curve (TESC) planner. Based on a Timed-Elastic Band, the problem is defined so that the trajectory lies on a spline in SE(2) with non-vanishing n-th derivatives at every point. Formulated as a multi-objective nonlinear optimization problem, it allows imposing soft constraints such as collision-avoidance, velocity, acceleration and jerk limits, and more. The planning process is realtime-capable allowing the robot to navigate in dynamic complex scenarios. The proposed method is compared against the state-of-the-art in various scenarios. Results show that trajectories generated by the TESC planner have smaller average acceleration and are more efficient in terms of total curvature and pseudo-kinetic energy while being produced with more consistency than state-of-the-art planners do.

Motion planning is one of the main problems studied in the field of robotics. However, it is still challenging for the state-of-the-art methods to handle multiple conditions that allow better paths to be found. For example, considering joint limits, path smoothness and a mixture of Cartesian and joint-space constraints at the same time pose a significant challenge for many of them. This letter proposes to use timed-elastic bands for representing the manipulation motion planning problem, allowing to apply continuously optimized constraints to the problem during the search for a solution. Due to the nature of our method, it is highly extensible with new constraints or optimization objectives. The proposed approach is compared against state-of-the-art methods in various manipulation scenarios. The results show that it is more consistent and less variant, while performing in a comparable manner to that of the state of the art. This behavior allows the proposed method to set a lower-bound performance guarantee for other methods to build upon.

This paper describes a self-calibration procedure that jointly estimates the extrinsic parameters of an exteroceptive sensor able to observe ego-motion, and the intrinsic parameters of an odometry motion model, consisting of wheel radii and wheel separation. We use iterative nonlinear on-manifold optimization with a graphical representation of the state, and resort to an adaptation of the pre-integration theory, initially developed for the IMU motion sensor, to be applied to the differential drive motion model. For this, we describe the construction of a pre-integrated factor for the differential drive motion model, which includes the motion increment, its covariance, and a first-order approximation of its dependence with the calibration parameters. As the calibration parameters change at each solver iteration, this allows a posteriori factor correction without the need of re-integrating the motion data. We validate our proposal in simulations and on a real robot and show the convergence of the calibration towards the true values of the parameters. It is then tested online in simulation and is shown to accommodate to variations in the calibration parameters when the vehicle is subject to physical changes such as loading and unloading a freight.

A Lie group is an old mathematical abstract object dating back to the XIX century, when mathematician Sophus Lie laid the foundations of the theory of continuous transformation groups. As it often happens, its usage has spread over diverse areas of science and technology many years later. In robotics, we are recently experiencing an important trend in its usage, at least in the fields of estimation, and particularly in motion estimation for navigation. Yet for a vast majority of roboticians, Lie groups are highly abstract constructions and therefore difficult to understand and to use. This may be due to the fact that most of the literature on Lie theory is written by and for mathematicians and physicists, who might be more used than us to the deep abstractions this theory deals with. In estimation for robotics it is often not necessary to exploit the full capacity of the theory, and therefore an effort of selection of materials is required. In this paper, we will walk through the most basic principles of the Lie theory, with the aim of conveying clear and useful ideas, and leave a significant corpus of the Lie theory behind. Even with this mutilation, the material included here has proven to be extremely useful in modern estimation algorithms for robotics, especially in the fields of SLAM, visual odometry, and the like. Alongside this micro Lie theory, we provide a chapter with a few application examples, and a vast reference of formulas for the major Lie groups used in robotics, including most jacobian matrices and the way to easily manipulate them. We also present a new C++ template-only library implementing all the functionality described here.

We address in this letter the problem of loop closure detection for laser-based simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) of very large areas. Consistent with the state of the art, the map is encoded as a graph of poses, and to cope with very large mapping capabilities, loop closures are asserted by comparing the features extracted from a query laser scan against a previously acquired corpus of scan features using a bag-of-words (BoW) scheme. Two contributions are here presented. First, to benefit from the graph topology, feature frequency scores in the BoW are computed not only for each individual scan but also from neighboring scans in the SLAM graph. This has the effect of enforcing neighbor relational information during document matching. Second, a weak geometric check that takes into account feature ordering and occlusions is introduced that substantially improves loop closure detection performance. The two contributions are evaluated both separately and jointly on four common SLAM datasets and are shown to improve the state-of-the-art performance both in terms of precision and recall in most of the cases. Moreover, our current implementation is designed to work at nearly frame rate, allowing loop closure query resolution at nearly 22 Hz for the best case scenario and 2 Hz for the worst case scenario.

In this project we develop a system that uses low cost web cameras to recognise gestures and track 2D orientations of the hand. This report is organized as such. First in section 2 we introduce various methods we undertook for hand detection. This is the most important step in hand gesture recognition. Results of various skin detection algorithms are discussed in length. This is followed by region extraction step (section 3). In this section approaches like contours and convex hull to extract region of interest which is hand are discussed. In section 4 a method is describe to recognize the open hand gesture. Two additional gestures of palm and fist are implemented using Haar-like features. These are discussed in section 5. In section 6 Kalman filter is introduced which tracks the centroid of hand region. The report is concluded by discussing about various issues related with the embraced approach (section 9) and future recommendations to improve the system is pointed out (section 10).