Loosely coupled 4D-Radar-Inertial Odometry for Ground Robots

Accurate robot odometry is essential for autonomous navigation. While numerous techniques have been developed based on various sensor suites, odometry estimation using only radar and IMU remains an underexplored area. Radar proves particularly valuable in environments where traditional sensors, like cameras or LiDAR, may struggle, especially in low-light conditions or when faced with environmental challenges like fog, rain or smoke. However, despite its robustness, radar data is noisier and more prone to outliers, requiring specialized processing approaches. In this paper, we propose a graph-based optimization approach using a sliding window for radar-based odometry, designed to maintain robust relationships between poses by forming a network of connections, while keeping computational costs fixed (specially beneficial in long trajectories). Additionally, we introduce an enhancement in the ego-velocity estimation specifically for ground vehicles, both holonomic and non-holonomic, which subsequently improves the direct odometry input required by the optimizer. Finally, we present a comparative study of our approach against existing algorithms, showing how our pure odometry approach inproves the state of art in most trajectories of the NTU4DRadLM dataset, achieving promising results when evaluating key performance metrics.

Adaptive Social Force Window Planner with Reinforcement Learning

Human-aware navigation is a complex task for mobile robots, requiring an autonomous navigation system capable of achieving efficient path planning together with socially compliant behaviors. Social planners usually add costs or constraints to the objective function, leading to intricate tuning processes or tailoring the solution to the specific social scenario. Machine Learning can enhance planners' versatility and help them learn complex social behaviors from data. This work proposes an adaptive social planner, using a Deep Reinforcement Learning agent to dynamically adjust the weighting parameters of the cost function used to evaluate trajectories. The resulting planner combines the robustness of the classic Dynamic Window Approach, integrated with a social cost based on the Social Force Model, and the flexibility of learning methods to boost the overall performance on social navigation tasks. Our extensive experimentation on different environments demonstrates the general advantage of the proposed method over static cost planners.

ars548_ros. An ARS 548 RDI radar driver for ROS2

The ARS 548 RDI Radar is a premium model of the fifth generation of 77 GHz long range radar sensors with new RF antenna arrays, which offer digital beam forming. This radar measures independently the distance, speed and angle of objects without any reflectors in one measurement cycle based on Pulse Compression with New Frequency Modulation [1]. Unfortunately, there were not any drivers available for Linux systems to make the user able to analyze the data acquired from this sensor to the best of our knowledge. In this paper, we present a driver that is able to interpret the data from the ARS 548 RDI sensor and produce data in Robot Operation System version 2 (ROS2). Thus, this data can be stored, represented and analyzed by using the powerful tools offered by ROS2. Besides, our driver offers advanced object features provided by the sensor, such as relative estimated velocity and acceleration of each object, its orientation and angular velocity. We focus on the configuration of the sensor and the use of our driver and advanced filtering and representation tools, offering a video tutorial for these purposes. Finally, a dataset acquired with this sensor and an Ouster OS1-32 LiDAR sensor for baseline purposes is available, so that the user can check the correctness of our driver.

FROG: A new people detection dataset for knee-high 2D range finders

Mobile robots require knowledge of the environment, especially of humans located in its vicinity. While the most common approaches for detecting humans involve computer vision, an often overlooked hardware feature of robots for people detection are their 2D range finders. These were originally intended for obstacle avoidance and mapping/SLAM tasks. In most robots, they are conveniently located at a height approximately between the ankle and the knee, so they can be used for detecting people too, and with a larger field of view and depth resolution compared to cameras. In this paper, we present a new dataset for people detection using knee-high 2D range finders called FROG. This dataset has greater laser resolution, scanning frequency, and more complete annotation data compared to existing datasets such as DROW. Particularly, the FROG dataset contains annotations for 100% of its laser scans (unlike DROW which only annotates 5%), 17x more annotated scans, 100x more people annotations, and over twice the distance traveled by the robot. We propose a benchmark based on the FROG dataset, and analyze a collection of state-of-the-art people detectors based on 2D range finder data. We also propose and evaluate a new end-to-end deep learning approach for people detection. Our solution works with the raw sensor data directly (not needing hand-crafted input data features), thus avoiding CPU preprocessing and releasing the developer of understanding specific domain heuristics. Experimental results show how the proposed people detector attains results comparable to the state of the art, while an optimized implementation for ROS can operate at more than 500 Hz.

HuNavSim: A ROS 2 Human Navigation Simulator for Benchmarking Human-Aware Robot Navigation

This work presents the Human Navigation Simulator (HuNavSim), a novel open-source tool for the simulation of different human-agent navigation behaviors in scenarios with mobile robots. The tool, the first programmed under the ROS 2 framework, can be employed along with different well-known robotics simulators like Gazebo. The main goal is to ease the development and evaluation of human-aware robot navigation systems in simulation. Besides a general human-navigation model, HuNavSim includes, as a novelty, a rich set of individual and realistic human navigation behaviors and a complete set of metrics for social navigation benchmarking.

OG-SGG: Ontology-Guided Scene Graph Generation. A Case Study in Transfer Learning for Telepresence Robotics

Scene graph generation from images is a task of great interest to applications such as robotics, because graphs are the main way to represent knowledge about the world and regulate human-robot interactions in tasks such as Visual Question Answering (VQA). Unfortunately, its corresponding area of machine learning is still relatively in its infancy, and the solutions currently offered do not specialize well in concrete usage scenarios. Specifically, they do not take existing "expert" knowledge about the domain world into account; and that might indeed be necessary in order to provide the level of reliability demanded by the use case scenarios. In this paper, we propose an initial approximation to a framework called Ontology-Guided Scene Graph Generation (OG-SGG), that can improve the performance of an existing machine learning based scene graph generator using prior knowledge supplied in the form of an ontology; and we present results evaluated on a specific scenario founded in telepresence robotics.

Autonomous Aerial Robot for High-Speed Search and Intercept Applications

In recent years, high-speed navigation and environment interaction in the context of aerial robotics has become a field of interest for several academic and industrial research studies. In particular, Search and Intercept (SaI) applications for aerial robots pose a compelling research area due to their potential usability in several environments. Nevertheless, SaI tasks involve a challenging development regarding sensory weight, on-board computation resources, actuation design and algorithms for perception and control, among others. In this work, a fully-autonomous aerial robot for high-speed object grasping has been proposed. As an additional sub-task, our system is able to autonomously pierce balloons located in poles close to the surface. Our first contribution is the design of the aerial robot at an actuation and sensory level consisting of a novel gripper design with additional sensors enabling the robot to grasp objects at high speeds. The second contribution is a complete software framework consisting of perception, state estimation, motion planning, motion control and mission control in order to rapid- and robustly perform the autonomous grasping mission. Our approach has been validated in a challenging international competition and has shown outstanding results, being able to autonomously search, follow and grasp a moving object at 6 m/s in an outdoor environment

Skyeye Team at MBZIRC 2020: A team of aerial and ground robots for GPS-denied autonomous fire extinguishing in an urban building scenario

The paper presents a presents a framework for fire extinguishing in an urban scenario by a team of aerial and ground robots. The system was developed for the Challenge 3 of the 2020 Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge (MBZIRC). The challenge required to autonomously detect, locate and extinguish fires in different floors of a building, as well as in the surroundings. The multi-robot system developed consists of a heterogeneous robot team of up to three Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) and one Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV). The paper describes the main hardware and software components for UAV and UGV platforms. It also presents the main algorithmic components of the system: a 3D LIDAR-based mapping and localization module able to work in GPS-denied scenarios; a global planner and a fast local re-planning system for robot navigation; infrared-based perception and robot actuation control for fire extinguishing; and a mission executive and coordination module based on Behavior Trees. The paper finally describes the results obtained during competition, where the system worked fully autonomously and scored in all the trials performed. The system contributed to the third place achieved by the Skyeye team in the Grand Challenge of MBZIRC 2020.

DLL: Direct LIDAR Localization. A map-based localization approach for aerial robots

This paper presents DLL, a direct map-based localization technique using 3D LIDAR for its application to aerial robots. DLL implements a point cloud to map registration based on non-linear optimization of the distance of the points and the map, thus not requiring features, neither point correspondences. Given an initial pose, the method is able to track the pose of the robot by refining the predicted pose from odometry. Through benchmarks using real datasets and simulations, we show how the method performs much better than Monte-Carlo localization methods and achieves comparable precision to other optimization-based approaches but running one order of magnitude faster. The method is also robust under odometric errors. The approach has been implemented under the Robot Operating System (ROS), and it is publicly available.

Learning Human-Aware Path Planning with Fully Convolutional Networks

This work presents an approach to learn path planning for robot social navigation by demonstration. We make use of Fully Convolutional Neural Networks (FCNs) to learn from expert's path demonstrations a map that marks a feasible path to the goal as a classification problem. The use of FCNs allows us to overcome the problem of manually designing/identifying the cost-map and relevant features for the task of robot navigation. The method makes use of optimal Rapidly-exploring Random Tree planner (RRT*) to overcome eventual errors in the path prediction; the FCNs prediction is used as cost-map and also to partially bias the sampling of the configuration space, leading the planner to behave similarly to the learned expert behavior. The approach is evaluated in experiments with real trajectories and compared with Inverse Reinforcement Learning algorithms that use RRT* as underlying planner.