Exosense: A Vision-Centric Scene Understanding System For Safe Exoskeleton Navigation

Exoskeletons for daily use by those with mobility impairments are being developed. They will require accurate and robust scene understanding systems. Current research has used vision to identify immediate terrain and geometric obstacles, however these approaches are constrained to detections directly in front of the user and are limited to classifying a finite range of terrain types (e.g., stairs, ramps and level-ground). This paper presents Exosense, a vision-centric scene understanding system which is capable of generating rich, globally-consistent elevation maps, incorporating both semantic and terrain traversability information. It features an elastic Atlas mapping framework associated with a visual SLAM pose graph, embedded with open-vocabulary room labels from a Vision-Language Model (VLM). The device's design includes a wide field-of-view (FoV) fisheye multi-camera system to mitigate the challenges introduced by the exoskeleton walking pattern. We demonstrate the system's robustness to the challenges of typical periodic walking gaits, and its ability to construct accurate semantically-rich maps in indoor settings. Additionally, we showcase its potential for motion planning -- providing a step towards safe navigation for exoskeletons.

Language-EXtended Indoor SLAM (LEXIS): A Versatile System for Real-time Visual Scene Understanding

Versatile and adaptive semantic understanding would enable autonomous systems to comprehend and interact with their surroundings. Existing fixed-class models limit the adaptability of indoor mobile and assistive autonomous systems. In this work, we introduce LEXIS, a real-time indoor Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) system that harnesses the open-vocabulary nature of Large Language Models (LLMs) to create a unified approach to scene understanding and place recognition. The approach first builds a topological SLAM graph of the environment (using visual-inertial odometry) and embeds Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) features in the graph nodes. We use this representation for flexible room classification and segmentation, serving as a basis for room-centric place recognition. This allows loop closure searches to be directed towards semantically relevant places. Our proposed system is evaluated using both public, simulated data and real-world data, covering office and home environments. It successfully categorizes rooms with varying layouts and dimensions and outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA). For place recognition and trajectory estimation tasks we achieve equivalent performance to the SOTA, all also utilizing the same pre-trained model. Lastly, we demonstrate the system's potential for planning.