基于层次化SLAM的未知环境级联地图创建方法

针对大规模环境下障碍物、环境传感器、移动机器人自身位姿均未知的情况,提出层次化机器人同时定位与空间级联地图创建(SLAM)方法.首先建立子地图与拓扑节点两层结构环境模型,然后利用环境传感器感知信息辅助子地图局部坐标框架的在线创建和更新,同时在拓扑结构创建过程中,利用coupling summation公式推算节点间相对...     

基于细化算法的移动机器人拓扑地图创建

在大规模未知环境中,移动机器人要自主完成导航和路径规划等智能任务,关键问题是创建周围环境地图.拓扑地图.以图(Graph)的结构形式表现-个环境的连通性,是一种紧凑的环境表示方法.文中借鉴图像处理中的细化算法来创建室内环境的拓扑地图,首先以栅格地图建模机器人环境,然后将环境的栅格地图进行细化,提取出环境的有效拓扑信息.而且,此方法创建的拓扑地图,未直接使用传感器原始数据,对环境的变化具有较强的鲁棒性.仿真实验结果表明,基于细化算法创建的环境拓扑地图,清晰、简洁,不会产生多余的节点和路径信息.相比于栅格地图,信息存储量明显减少,从而提高了移动机器人自主运行、导航和路径规划的能力,大大提高了系统的工作效率.     

基于自由空间中线法提取构建拓扑地图

首先利用激光传感器扫描数据,构建环境的以点阵表示的几何地图,然后在构建环境几何地图的基础上,利用提出的中线法抽取机器人所处环境的自由空间的拓扑结构,在拓扑节点构建时,加入机器人位姿信息,完成拓扑地图的构建。将该算法分别在Z型和T型环境中进行实验,构建环境几何地图,并抽取相应的拓扑结构。结果表明,该方法能够实时、安全、紧凑地表示环境。     

图形相似性匹配在多机器人地图中的应用

在多机器人同时定位与地图创建（Simultaneous Localization and Mapping,SLAM）协同工作下,要求融合各机器人的特征子地图形成单一的公共地图,利用三角形相似性原理,实现SLAM定位中各机器人子地图的相互匹配。在机器人创建的地图中,依据路标位置相关的特征组成最小三角形,并通过三角形相似性原理对各机器人创建子地图进行相似性匹配,并记录相似三角形对应点匹配次数,最后彼此匹配次数最多的对应路标即为相关联的路标对。实验结果表明该方法是有效的,且鲁棒性强。     

基于人工引导的机器人建图技术

移动机器人能够创建精确的环境地图,是其具有准确的定位能力以及完成其他任务的前提。因此地图创建技术是移动机器人的关键技术。提出了一种基于人工引导方式的地图创建技术。该技术一方面弥补了传统机器人建图过程中自动搜索路径低效率的弱点,另一方面通过人机交互,机器人可以在建图的过程中记住关键的路径点,建立栅格地图与拓扑地图的混合地图,为移动机器人将来的导航奠定基础。     

基于动态精简式混合地图的移动机器人自主探索

针对未知环境下移动机器人自主探索和地图创建问题,在机器人操作系统的框架下,提出一种基于动态精简式混合地图的移动机器人自主探索方法.首先,提出一种基于几何规则的候选目标点生成方法,用于快速提取当前的前沿目标点;然后,从信息收益和路径成本的角度,引入一种改进的效用函数来评价候选目标点;最后,利用缓存增量式的原理优化拓扑节点,进而构建精简式混合地图.实验结果表明,通过拓扑图构建策略的改进,所提出方法具有良好的导航性能.     

一种桌面机器人及其自主地图绘制算法

利用嵌入式技术设计了一种桌面机器人系统,机器人体积不到200 cm3,系统利用全局摄像机采集图像,通过无线通信组件对机器人定位导航,从而进行面向地图绘制的智能行为研究;从桌面机器人系统采集到地图信息,并生成神经网络训练样本,利用可增长自组织特征映射图GSOM(Growing Self-organizing Map)的地图绘制算法,通过不断增加新的神经元实现网络规模的增长,从而生成以少数SOM图神经元分布描述环境特征信息的拓扑地图;在机器人系统上进行了基于GSOM模型的自主地图的绘制实验,并利用所得拓扑地图进行了准确的机器人导航实验.实验结果表明基于GSOM的自主地图绘制方法可行,机器人系统表现出类似生物的自主智能行为.该方法可以应用于大环境下机器人的自主地图测绘与导航.     

基于不确定信息的移动机器人地图创建研究进展

移动机器人自主的地图创建是机器人研究中一个基础且重要的问题．本文对该领域的最新进 展进行了综述,特别侧重于在完全未知环境中基于不确定信息的地图创建问题．首 先介绍了单机器人的地图创建方法,详细分析了地图表示方法、导航问题、不确定信息的描 述和处理等关键技术;对多机器人协作的地图创建问题也根据最新文献进行了论述．文中指 出了机器人地图创建研究中所面临的主要问题,并探讨了将来的发展方向．     

一种基于特征地图的移动机器人SLAM方案

设计了一种结构化环境中基于特征地图的地图创建方案;采用激光测距仪进行特征地图创建,利用"聚合-分害虫-聚合"的方法来提取线段表示环境信息实现局部地图创建;为了实现移动机器人的同时定位与地图创建,采用扩展卡尔曼滤波方法对机器人的位姿与地图信息进行预测及更新,结合状态估计和数据关联理论,实验显示x的校正量保持在±0.9cm之内;y的校正量保持在±2.5cm之内;θ的校正量在±1.2之内,实现了基于扩展卡尔曼滤波器的SLAM.     

室内未知环境下移动机器人特征地图创建研究

介绍了在室内未知环境下移动机器人利用激光雷达、电子罗盘和里程计等传感器信息创建特征地图的方法;从激光雷达数据中提取直线特征作为地图的主要环境描述特征,采用构建直线模板的方法对雷达数据进行分簇,通过最小二乘法拟合出相应的直线并对冗余地图线段进行合并,从而得到较精确的特征地图;实验表明该机器人建立的环境特征地图是精确有效的,且与栅格地图相比数据量小,可进一步用于机器人的避障、路径规划等复杂任务.     

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.     

A robust navigation system for robotic wheelchairs

A landmark based navigation system for robotic wheelchairs is developed. The proposed navigation system is robust in the localization procedure which is the major problem in robotic navigation systems. Every landmark is composed of a segment of metallic path and a radio-frequency identification (RFID) tag. The odometry information is used for localization, which is corrected on-line every time the robotic wheelchair is over a landmark. A topological map is generated using such landmarks to compute the shortest path. A technique to generate the topological map for this navigation system and an obstacle avoidance strategy are also developed.     

Vision Based Intelligent Wheel Chair Control: The Role of Vision and Inertial Sensing in Topological Navigation

This paper describes ongoing research on vision based mobile robot navigation for wheel chairs. After a guided tour through a natural environment while taking images at regular time intervals, natural landmarks are extracted to automatically build a topological map. Later on this map can be used for place recognition and navigation. We use visual servoing on the landmarks to steer the robot. In this paper, we investigate ways to improve the performance by incorporating inertial sensors. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Cleaning robot navigation using panoramic views and particle clouds as landmarks

The paper describes a visual method for the navigation of autonomous floor-cleaning robots. The method constructs a topological map with metrical information where place nodes are characterized by panoramic images and by particle clouds representing position estimates. Current image and position estimate of the robot are interrelated to landmark images and position estimates stored in the map nodes through a holistic visual homing method which provides bearing and orientation estimates. Based on these estimates, a position estimate of the robot is updated by a particle filter. The robot’s position estimates are used to guide the robot along parallel, meandering lanes and are also assigned to newly created map nodes which later serve as landmarks. Computer simulations and robot experiments confirm that the robot position estimate obtained by this method is sufficiently accurate to keep the robot on parallel lanes, even in the presence of large random and systematic odometry errors. This ensures an efficient cleaning behavior with almost complete coverage of a rectangular area and only small repeated coverage. Furthermore, the topological-metrical map can be used to completely cover rooms or apartments by multiple meander parts.     

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.     

Qualitative spatial representations from task-oriented perception and exploratory behaviors

We describe motor and perceptual behaviors that have proven useful for indoor navigation of an autonomous mobile robot. These behaviors take advantage of the large amount of structure that characterizes many indoor, office-like environments. Based on pre-existing structural landmarks, a mobile robot has the ability to explore, map, and navigate one among several office buildings sharing similar structural features, while coping with slow environment variations and local dynamics. The mobile robot develops and maintains an internal spatial representation of the environment in terms of a topological and qualitative map. The types of structural features suitable as navigation landmarks largely depend upon the available sensors. Adequate navigation performance is achieved by subdividing perception and navigation into a number of behaviors layered upon a multi-threaded real-time control architecture.     

Online topological map building and qualitative localization in large-scale environment

A novel topological map representation as well as an online map construction approach is presented in this paper. By virtue of the topological map whose nodes are represented with the free beams of the laser range finder together with the visual scale-invariant features, the mobile robot can autonomously navigate in unknown, large-scale and indoor environments. Different from the traditional navigation methods that rely on precise global localization, the robot locates itself qualitatively by location recognition rather than calculating its global pose in the world reference frame. By combining the reactive navigational method, Beam Curvature Method (BCM), with the topological map, a smooth, real-time navigation without precise localization can be realized.     

基于目标导向行为和空间拓扑记忆的视觉导航方法

针对在具有动态因素且视觉丰富环境中的导航问题,受路标机制空间记忆方式启发,提出一种可同步学习目标导向行为和记忆空间结构的视觉导航方法.首先,为直接从原始输入中学习控制策略,以深度强化学习为基本导航框架,同时添加碰撞预测作为模型辅助任务;然后,在智能体学习导航过程中,利用时间相关性网络祛除冗余观测及寻找导航节点,实现通过情景记忆递增描述环境结构;最后,将空间拓扑地图作为路径规划模块集成到模型中,并结合动作网络用于获取更加通用的导航方法.实验在3D仿真环境DMlab中进行,实验结果表明,本文方法可从视觉输入中学习目标导向行为,在所有测试环境中均展现出更高效的学习方法和导航策略,同时减少构建地图所需数据量;而在包含动态堵塞的环境中,该模型可使用拓扑地图动态规划路径,从而引导绕路行为完成导航任务,展现出良好的环境适应性.     

Visual Recognition of Workspace Landmarks for Topological Navigation

In this work, robot navigation is approached using visual landmarks. Landmarks are not preselected or otherwise defined a priori; they are extracted automatically during a learning phase. To facilitate this, a saliency map is constructed on the basis of which potential landmarks are highlighted. This is used in conjunction with a model-driven segregation of the workspace to further delineate search areas for landmarks in the environment. For the sake of robustness, no semantic information is attached to the landmarks; they are stored as raw patterns, along with information readily available from the workspace segregation. This subsequently facilitates their accurate recognition during a navigation session, when similar steps are employed to locate landmarks, as in the learning phase. The stored information is used to transform a previously learned landmark pattern, according to the current position of the observer, thus achieving accurate landmark recognition. Results obtained using this approach demonstrate its validity and applicability in indoor workspaces.