一种室内移动机器人自主探索方法

研究室内未知环境下的移动机器人自主探索问题,并提出改进策略.首先,提出一种基于可通行区域的探索目标点快速提取方法,以补充原有方法在特殊环境结构下出现的提取探索目标点失败的缺陷;然后,提出一种基于激光数据和栅格地图信息的实时拓扑地图构建与优化方法,使得探索地图更加精简,探索过程更加高效;最后,通过改进的避障模块实现机器人的运动控制,以到达机器人安全探索的目标.同时,该系统采取机器人操作系统(Robot operating system, ROS)下的分布式结构,将整体算法合理分配到客户端和服务器,降低系统实现的硬件要求.现场实验表明,所提出方法具有良好的自主导航性能,在较复杂的室内未知环境下,仍能保持良好的地图构建能力和避障能力.     

一种基于RGB-D的移动机器人未知室内环境自主探索与地图构建方法

提出了一种基于RGB-D信息的移动机器人自主探索与地图构建方法.首先,基于RGB-D传感器提供的信息,通过定位点生成、地图构建与闭环检测,实时构建3D点云地图.然后,将探索过程描述成部分可观测马尔可夫决策过程,结合局部地图推演策略与全局边界搜索策略,建立了移动机器人的自主探索方法.在此基础上,确定移动机器人当前动作约束,采用动态窗运动控制方法,既能避免移动机器人陷入局部最优,又能保证采用RGB-D数据进行建图时的稳定性.最后,开展了实验室场景下的探索任务实验,验证了本文提出的移动机器人未知环境自主探索与地图构建方法的有效性.     

无路标环境下遥操作机器人SLAM系统

为了提高遥操作机器人的实用性和高效性,设计与开发了一种基于无线网络的无路标未知环境下探索移动机器人系统,其包括移动机器人子系统和机器人远程状态监视子系统.根据机器人功能需求,提出一种多控制器协作及多传感器信息融合的移动机器人硬件结构.利用机器人实时定位和激光测距扫描的能力,提出了一种改进的VFH算法,进行机器人自主局部路径规划.机器人远程状态监视子系统通过无线网络设定机器人的目标点,实时监视机器人状态,并绘制机器人所探索的环境地图.实验表明,开发的探索移动机器人系统具备了在未知环境探索的能力.     

基于VSLAM的自主移动机器人三维同时定位与地图构建

移动机器人在探索未知环境且没有外部参考系统的情况下,面临着同时定位和地图构建（SLAM）问题。针对基于特征的视觉SLAM（VSLAM）算法构建的稀疏地图不利于机器人应用的问题,提出一种基于八叉树结构的高效、紧凑的地图构建算法。首先,根据关键帧的位姿和深度数据,构建图像对应场景的点云地图;然后利用八叉树地图技术进行处理,构建出了适合于机器人应用的地图。将所提算法同RGB-D SLAM（RGB-Depth SLAM）算法、ElasticFusion算法和ORB-SLAM（Oriented FAST and Rotated BRIEF SLAM）算法通过权威数据集进行了对比实验,实验结果表明,所提算法具有较高的有效性、精度和鲁棒性。最后,搭建了自主移动机器人,将改进的VSLAM系统应用到移动机器人中,能够实时地完成自主避障和三维地图构建,解决稀疏地图无法用于避障和导航的问题。     

基于激光雷达与双目视觉的移动机器人SLAM研究

为解决移动机器人在环境未知条件下,利用单一传感器自主导航时不能及时定位、构建地图不精确的问题,提出采用一种改进RBPF算法,在计算提议分布时将移动机器人的观测数据(视觉信息与激光雷达信息)和里程计信息融合;针对一般视觉图像特征点提取算法较慢的问题,采用基于ORB算法对视觉图像进行处理以加快视觉图像处理速度的方法;最后通过在安装有开源机器人操作系统(ROS)的履带式移动机器人进行实验,验证了采用该方法可构建可靠性更高、更精确的2D栅格图,提高了移动机器人SLAM的鲁棒性.     

基于聚类匹配的移动机器人地图实时创建算法

提出了一种基于模式识别聚类思想的数据点集匹配算法.该匹配算法具有传统迭代匹配算法和非迭代匹配算法的优点,匹配速度快,精度高.结合上述匹配算法,给出了一种基于激光测距仪的移动机器人环境地图实时创建方法.该方法使用从环境数据中提取出的特征点来完成两组激光数据点集的匹配,进而完成环境地图的创建.利用本实验室自主研发的救援机器人平台对该算法进行了验证,实验结果表明,该算法能够完成室内环境下移动机器人实时准确有效的环境地图创建.     

基于超声波的移动机器人的同时定位和地图构建

为了在移动机器人SLAM过程中得到更精确的定位和二维地图构建,对一种利用超声波传感器信息进行栅格地图创建的方法提出了改进;该方法利用Bayes法则对信息进行融合,利用粒子滤波和航位推算相结合的方法对机器人进行精确定位和创建地图,然后利用移动的栅格法进行地图的全局更新,提出了一种地图的校验方法;通过实验,在粒子数为200的情况下分别得到了算法改进前和改进后的地图构建结果,通过比较,证明了使用该算法进行移动机器人定位和地图构建更加精确。     

未知环境下移动机器人地图构建仿真研究

未知环境的地图构建是移动机器人研究领域的一个研究热点.为了研究在未知环境下移动机器人地图构建,基于微软机器人开发工作室(MRDS),对虚拟环境中移动机器人进行了仿真建模,通过激光测距仪获取未知环境信息,应用迭代最近点(ICP)算法处理未知环境信息实现了移动机器人对未知环境地图构建.对移动机器人地图构建仿真实验结果表明,文中的方法能够有效地实现未知环境地图构建,可为移动机器人运动提供导向作用,具有一定的理论和现实意义.     

基于环境特征的机器人同时定位与地图创建

移动机器人同时定位和地图创建是实现移动机器人完全自主导航的关键.本文提出了一个通用的移动机器人同时定位与地图创建基本框架,接着对扩展卡尔曼滤波器算法进行了详细的分析,最后通过基于点特征和扩展卡尔曼滤波器的同时定位与地图创建仿真实验,验证了框架的可行性.目的是为开展同时定位与地图创建的研究提供一种可行的研究方案,以推动我国移动机器人技术的发展.     

基于激光扫描测距的机器人粒子滤波定位技术研究

传统的粒子滤波即时定位与地图构建(SLAM)算法在构建地图和目标进行自主定位时,粒子数量大,占用的内存高,重采样之后容易出现粒子匮乏现象,为了提高机器人自主定位的效率,提出了一种改进的重采样策略和粒子更新策略,融入系统模型.在装有机器人操作系统(ROS)的旅行家移动机器人上进行测试,实验结果表明:方法能够有效提升粒子滤波定位的效率.     

Path planning of wheeled mobile robot with simultaneous free space locating capability

This paper presents a hybrid path planning algorithm for the design of autonomous vehicles such as mobile robots. The hybrid planner is based on Potential Field method and Voronoi Diagram approach and is represented with the ability of concurrent navigation and map building. The system controller (Look-ahead Control) with the Potential Field method guarantees the robot generate a smooth and safe path to an expected position. The Voronoi Diagram approach is adopted for the purpose of helping the mobile robot to avoid being trapped by concave environment while exploring a route to a target. This approach allows the mobile robot to accomplish an autonomous navigation task with only an essential exploration between a start and goal position. Based on the existing topological map the mobile robot is able to construct sub-goals between predefined start and goal, and follows a smooth and safe trajectory in a flexible manner when stationary and moving obstacles co-exist.     

Autonomous Exploring System Based on Ultrasonic Sensory Information

An autonomous exploring system for a mobile robot is presented in this article. The system consists of an ultrasonic range sensor (URS) module and a novel method for building a map from exploration of an environment. Instead of random exploration, the proposed approach provides a systematic and efficient strategy to build the map by means of some preferential points. Taking a multitude of observations or measurements by sonar sensors, a mobile robot derives a virtual polygonal map from a set of regressed segments, partial prior known environmental information, and some inference rules for vertices. Additionally, the concept of safe zones is also introduced in the system to keep the mobile robot safe during exploration. Based on the identified virtual map, a searching method is used to select a next best observation to collect the most sufficient information. Several experiments are given to demonstrate the performance of this proposed approach.     

Real-time building of a thinning-based topological map

An accurate and compact map is essential to an autonomous mobile robot system. A topological map, one of the most popular map types, can be used to represent the environment in terms of discrete nodes with edges connecting them. It is usually constructed by Voronoi-like graphs, but in this paper the topological map is incrementally built based on the local grid map by using a thinning algorithm. This algorithm, when combined with the application of the C-obstacle, can easily extract only the meaningful topological information in real-time and is robust to environment change, because this map is extracted from a local grid map generated based on the Bayesian update formula. In this paper, position probability is defined to evaluate the quantitative reliability of the end node extracted by the thinning process. Since the thinning process builds only local topological maps, a global topological map should be constructed by merging local topological maps according to nodes with high position probability. For real and complex environments, experiments showed that the proposed map building method based on the thinning process can accurately build a local topological map in real-time, with which an accurate global topological map can be incrementally constructed.     

Thinning-Based Topological Exploration Using Position Possibility of Topological Nodes

A grid map can be efficiently used in navigation, but this type of map requires a large amount of memory in proportion to the size of the environment. As an alternative, a topological map can be used to represent the environment in terms of discrete nodes with edges connecting them. It is usually constructed by Voronoi-like graphs, but in this paper the topological map is built based on the local grid map by using a thinning algorithm. This new approach can easily extract the topological information in real-time and be robustly applicable to the real environment, and this map can be autonomously built by exploration. The position possibility is defined to evaluate the quantitative reliability of the topological map and then a new exploration scheme based on the position possibility is proposed. From the position possibility information, the robot can determine whether or not it needs to visit a specific end node, which node will be the next target and how much of the environment has yet been explored. Various experiments showed that the proposed map-building and exploration methods can accurately build a local topological map in real-time and can guide a robot safely even in a dynamic environment.     

Robust omnidirectional mobile robot topological navigation system using omnidirectional vision

Robust topological navigation strategy for omnidirectional mobile robot using an omnidirectional camera is described. The navigation system is composed of on-line and off-line stages. During the off-line learning stage, the robot performs paths based on motion model about omnidirectional motion structure and records a set of ordered key images from omnidirectional camera. From this sequence a topological map is built based on the probabilistic technique and the loop closure detection algorithm, which can deal with the perceptual aliasing problem in mapping process. Each topological node provides a set of omnidirectional images characterized by geometrical affine and scale invariant keypoints combined with GPU implementation. Given a topological node as a target, the robot navigation mission is a concatenation of topological node subsets. In the on-line navigation stage, the robot hierarchical localizes itself to the most likely node through the robust probability distribution global localization algorithm, and estimates the relative robot pose in topological node with an effective solution to the classical five-point relative pose estimation algorithm. Then the robot is controlled by a vision based control law adapted to omnidirectional cameras to follow the visual path. Experiment results carried out with a real robot in an indoor environment show the performance of the proposed method.     

一种基于声纳信息的地图创建方法

地图创建是实现机器人在未知环境中自主导航的关键。该文对移动机器人在地图创建中所收集的不确定传感信息进行研究,分析声纳传感器的散射和镜面反射特性,提出一种改进的概率栅格的地图创建方法。该方法将距离信任因子引入到声纳传感器模型。利用该模型,实现移动机器人的自主地图创建,并有效地减少由于声纳传感器所引起的不确定性。通过机器人平台上进行的实验表明该方法的有 效性。     

Using Absolute Metric Maps to Close Cycles in a Topological Map

In simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM) the correspondence problem, specifically detecting cycles, is one of the most difficult challenges for an autonomous mobile robot. In this paper we show how significant cycles in a topological map can be identified with a companion absolute global metric map. A tight coupling of the basic unit of representation in the two maps is the key to the method. Each local space visited is represented, with its own frame of reference, as a node in the topological map. In the global absolute metric map these local space representations from the topological map are described within a single global frame of reference. The method exploits the overlap which occurs when duplicate representations are computed from different vantage points for the same local space. The representations need not be exactly aligned and can thus tolerate a limited amount of accumulated error. We show how false positive overlaps which are the result of a misaligned map, can be discounted.     

Autonomous Exploration with Exact Inverse Sensor Models

This paper is focused on probabilistic occupancy grid mapping and motion planning such that a robot may build a map and explore a target area autonomously in real time. The desired path of the robot is developed in an optimal fashion to maximize the information gain from the sensor measurements on its path, thereby increasing the accuracy and efficiency of mapping, while explicitly considering the sensor limitations such as the maximum sensing range and viewing angle. Most current exploration techniques require frequent human intervention, often developed for omnidirectional sensors with infinite range. The proposed research is based on realistic assumptions on sensor capabilities. The unique contribution is that the mapping and autonomous exploration techniques are systematically developed in a rigorous, probabilistic formulation. The mapping approach exploits the probabilistic properties of the sensor and map explicitly, and the autonomous exploration is designed to maximize the expected map information gain, thereby improving the efficiency of the mapping procedure and the quality of the map substantially. The efficacy of the proposed optimal approach is illustrated by both numerical simulations and experimental results.     

基于场景图谱的室内移动机器人目标搜索

在移动机器人执行日常家庭任务时,首先需要其能够在环境中避开障碍物,自主地寻找到房间中的物体。针对移动机器人如何有效在室内环境下对目标物体进行搜索的问题,提出了一种基于场景图谱的室内移动机器人目标搜索,其框架结合了导航地图、语义地图和语义关系图谱。在导航地图的基础上建立了包含地标物体位置信息的语义地图,机器人可以轻松对地标物体进行寻找。对于动态的物体,机器人根据语义关系图中物体之间的并发关系,优先到关系强度比较高的地标物体旁寻找。通过物理实验展示了机器人在语义地图和语义关系图的帮助下可以实现在室内环境下有效地寻找到目标,并显著地减少了搜索的路径长度,证明了该方法的有效性。