CSCE 774 Robotics Systems
Fall 2015
From the surface of Mars and the far reaches of our Solar System to the bottom of the ocean, robots are helping us expand our scientific understanding of the universe. In our everyday life, devices that gather information and interact with the environment are ever-present, taking over many of the undesirable or dangerous tasks that humans had to perform previously. Fundamental to all these robotic devises is their ability to sense the environment, reason about it, and then plan and safely execute the best action. There are three fundamental challenges in robotics:
  • Localization
  • Mapping
  • Path Planning
This course is designed as an advance graduate course with a focus on the challenges of Localization and Mapping. Different sensors will be investigated with an emphasis on Visual and Inertial data. The first few lectures will provide necessary background on Localization, Mapping, SLAM, and state estimation; then we will switch to a reading group mode. Each lecture will focus on a paper, a student will present the main ideas, and then we will discuss the paper. Every student is expected to have read the paper and bring their understanding in the discussion.

Instructor

Evaluation:

  • Assigniments (3) 10% each: 30%
  • Final Exam (Oral) 20%
  • Class participation 20%
  • Presentations 30%
 

Student Presentations


Resources

Paper
 Resources Presenter Presentation Date Remarks
H. W. Sorenson. Least-squares estimation from Gauss to Kalman. IEEE Spectrum, 1970 Ioannis Rekleitis Sept. 15 Introduction to state estimation
Simon J. Julier Jeffrey K. Uhlmann. A New Extension of the Kalman Filter to Nonlinear Systems Dr. G. Terejanu Sept. 17
R. Smith, M. Self, and P. Cheeseman. "Estimating uncertain spatial relationships in robotics", Autonomous robot vehicles, 1990 Dr. A. Quattrini Li Sept. 22 One of the first formulations of SLAM
H. Durrant-Whyte and T. Bailey, "Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping: Part I", RAM, 2006 Marios Xanthidis Sept. 24 Overview paper first part
F. Lu and E. Milios, "Globally consistent range scan alignment for environment mapping". Autonomous Robots October 1997, Volume 4, Issue 4, pp 333-349 UDDIPAN CHATTERJEE Sept. 29
F. Lu and E. Milios, "Robot pose estimation in unknown environments by matching 2d range scans". IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp.935--938, 21-23 Jun 1994 Dr. A. Quattrini Li Oct. 1
T. Bailey and H. Durrant-Whyte, "Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping: Part II", RAM, 2006 AKANKSHA Overview paper second part
Michael Montemerlo, Sebastian Thrun, Daphne Koller, and Ben Wegbreit. FastSLAM 2.0: An Improved Particle Filtering Algorithm for Simultaneous Localization and Mapping that Provably Converges, Proceedings of the Sixteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) 2003
UDDIPAN CHATTERJEE Oct. 13
G. Grisetti, C. Stachniss, and W. Burgard. Improved Techniques for Grid Mapping with Rao-Blackwellized Particle Filters OpenSLAM code repository Mohammed Behbooei Oct. 15
S. Thrun and M. Montemerlo, "The GraphSLAM Algorithm with Applications to Large-Scale Mapping of Urban Structures", International Journal on Robotics Research, v. 25, no 5/6, pp. 403-430, 2005 A tutorial AKANKSHA Oct 20
R. Kummerle et al., "G2O: A general framework for graph optimisation", International Conference of Robotics andd Automation 2011 OpenSLAM code repository Adem Coskun Oct. 21 outside class hours 15:15-16:30
M. Kaess, A. Ranganathan, and F. Dellaert, "iSAM: Incremental Smoothing and Mapping" IEEE Transactions on Robotics, vol. 24, no. 6, Dec. 2008, pp. 1365-1378, TBD Oct. 27
M. Kaess, H. Johannsson, R. Roberts, V. Ila, J.J. Leonard, and F. Dellaert. "iSAM2: Incremental Smoothing and Mapping Using the Bayes Tree". International Journal of Robotics Research, vol. 31, Feb. 2012, pp. 217-236. Details Md Modasshir Oct. 29
D. Scaramuzza, F. Fraundorfer. Visual Odometry: Part I - The First 30 Years and Fundamentals IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine, Volume 18, issue 4, 2011. Presentation Sharmin Rahman Nov. 3 Overview paper first part
F. Fraundorfer, D. Scaramuzza. Visual odometry: Part II - Matching, robustness, optimization, and applications. IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine, Volume 19, issue 2, 2012. Presentation Sharmin Rahman Nov. 3 Overview paper second part
Bill Triggs, Philip F. McLauchlan, Richard I. Hartley, and Andrew W. Fitzgibbon. "Bundle Adjustment - A Modern Synthesis". Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vision Algorithms: Theory and Practice Volume 1883, 2000, pp 298-372 Marios Xanthidis Nov 5
D. Nister et. al., "Visual odometry for ground vehicle applications", JFR 2006 Apoorv Jagtap Nov 10
G. Klein and D. Murray, "Parallel Tracking and Mapping for Small AR Workspaces", ISMAR 2007 PTAM Adem Coskun Nov. 10
A.I. Mourikis and S.I. Roumeliotis, "A Multi-State Constrained Kalman filter for Vision-aided Inertial Navigation", In Proc. 2007 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Rome, Italy, Apr. 10-14, pp. 3565-3572 RAJA S MUKKALA Nov. 12
E. Jones and S. Soatto. Visual-Inertial Navigation, Mapping and Localization: A Scalable Real-Time Causal Approach. International Journal of Robotics Research, January 2011. Sean Doherty Nov. 17
Raul Mur-Artal, J. M. M. Montiel and Juan D. Tardos. ORB-SLAM: A Versatile and Accurate Monocular SLAM System. IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 2015 Code Sean Doherty Nov. 19
Michael Milford, Gordon Wyeth: Persistent navigation and mapping using a biologically inspired SLAM system, International Journal of Robotics Research, 2010 OpenSLAM code repository Shervin Ghasemloo Nov. 19
M. Cummins and P. Newman, "FAB-MAP: Probabilistic localization and mapping in the space of appearance", International Journal of Robotics Research, 2008 Official Page Apoorv Jagtap Nov. 24 Appearance based mapping
Forster, Christian, Pizzoli, Matia, and Scaramuzza, Davide. SVO: Fast Semi-Direct Monocular Visual Odometry. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2014 Code repository Shervin Ghasemloo Dec. 1
J. Engel, T. Schops, D. Cremers. LSD-SLAM: Large-Scale Direct Monocular SLAM. European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2014. Code repository Md Modasshir Dec. 1
G. Sibley et. al., "Adaptive relative bundle adjustment", Robotics: Science and Systems, 2009 Mohammed Behbooei Dec. 3
Florian Shkurti, Ioannis Rekleitis, Milena Scaccia, Gregory Dudek. State estimation of an underwater robot using visual and inertial information. IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2011 RAJA S MUKKALA Dec. 3
Mahon, I., Pizarro, O., Johnson-Roberson, M., Friedman, A., Williams, S., Henderson, J. Reconstructing Pavlopetri: mapping the world's oldest submerged town using stereo-vision. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2011 TBD
Richard A. Newcombe, Shahram Izadi, Otmar Hilliges, David Molyneaux, David Kim, Andrew J. Davison, Pushmeet Kohli, Jamie Shotton, Steve Hodges, and Andrew Fitzgibbon. "KinectFusion: Real-Time Dense Surface Mapping and Tracking". (ISMAR 2011, Best paper award!) TBD

Lecture notes are posted here

A Gentle Introduction to ROS

Exploration Video

Particle Filter video

Particle Filter Tutorial

Final Exam: Dec. 12 2015: 10am at the AFRL

Assignments

Description
 code
 worlds/data files
 Due date
pf2dlocalizer.zip assignment_1b_no_map.bag
  • Part I: 15 Sept. 2015
  • Part II: 30. Sept. 2015
Assignment 2: Bibliography Search (team)

30 Oct. 2015
Assignment 3: Vision based state estimation.

30 Nov. 2015