• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.52 no.8
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• pp.132-139
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• 2015

Visual SLAM(Simultaneous Localization And Mapping) has been used widely to estimate a mobile robot's location. Visual SLAM estimates relative motions with static visual features over image sequence. Because visual SLAM methods assume generally static features in the environment, we cannot obtain precise results in dynamic situation including many moving objects: cars and human beings. This paper presents a stereo vision based SLAM method in dynamic environment. First, we extract disparity map with stereo vision and compute optical flow. We then compute disparity change that is the estimated flow field between stereo views. After examining the disparity change value, we detect ROIs(Region Of Interest) in disparity space to determine dynamic scene objects. In indoor environment, many structural planes like walls may be determined as false dynamic elements. To solve this problem, we segment the scene into planar structure. More specifically, disparity values by the stereo vision are projected to X-Z plane and we employ Hough transform to determine planes. In final step, we remove ROIs nearby the walls and discriminate static scene elements in indoor environment. The experimental results show that the proposed method can obtain stable performance in dynamic environment.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SC
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• v.49 no.4
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• pp.90-101
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• 2012

The landmark selection is crucial to successful perform in SLAM(Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) with a mono camera. Especially, in unknown environment, automatic landmark selection is needed since there is no advance information about landmark. In this paper, proposed visual attention system which modeled human's vision system will be used in order to select landmark automatically. The edge feature is one of the most important element for attention in previous visual attention system. However, when the edge feature is used in complicated indoor area, the response of complicated area disappears, and between flat surfaces are getting higher. Also, computation cost increases occurs due to the growth of the dimensionality since it uses the responses for 4 directions. This paper suggests to use a corner feature in order to solve or prevent the problems mentioned above. Using a corner feature can also increase the accuracy of data association by concentrating on area which is more complicated and informative in indoor environments. Finally, this paper will prove that visual attention system based on corner feature can be more effective in SLAM compared to previous method by experiment.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.43 no.4
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• pp.603-616
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• 2021

Over the last few years, autonomous vehicles have progressed very rapidly. The odometry technique that estimates displacement from consecutive sensor inputs is an essential technique for autonomous driving. In this article, we propose a fast, robust, and accurate odometry technique. The proposed technique is light detection and ranging (LiDAR)-based direct odometry, which uses a spherical range image (SRI) that projects a three-dimensional point cloud onto a two-dimensional spherical image plane. Direct odometry is developed in a vision-based method, and a fast execution speed can be expected. However, applying LiDAR data is difficult because of the sparsity. To solve this problem, we propose an SRI generation method and mathematical analysis, two key point sampling methods using SRI to increase precision and robustness, and a fast optimization method. The proposed technique was tested with the KITTI dataset and real environments. Evaluation results yielded a translation error of 0.69%, a rotation error of 0.0031°/m in the KITTI training dataset, and an execution time of 17 ms. The results demonstrated high precision comparable with state-of-the-art and remarkably higher speed than conventional techniques.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Surveying, Geodesy, Photogrammetry and Cartography
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• v.37 no.2
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• pp.45-53
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• 2019

RGB-D SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) refers to the technology of using deep camera as a visual sensor for SLAM. In view of the disadvantages of high cost and indefinite scale in the construction of maps for laser sensors and traditional single and binocular cameras, a method for creating three-dimensional map of indoor environment with deep environment data combined with RGB-D SLAM scheme is studied. The method uses a mobile robot system equipped with a consumer-grade RGB-D sensor (Kinect) to acquire depth data, and then creates indoor three-dimensional point cloud maps in real time through key technologies such as positioning point generation, closed-loop detection, and map construction. The actual field experiment results show that the average error of the point cloud map created by the algorithm is 0.0045m, which ensures the stability of the construction using deep data and can accurately create real-time three-dimensional maps of indoor unknown environment.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.19 no.9
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• pp.813-821
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• 2013

In this paper, we present the development of P-SURO II hybrid AUV (Autonomous Underwater Vehicle) which can be operated in both of AUV and ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle) modes. In its AUV mode, the vehicle is supposed to carry out some of underwater missions which are difficult to be achieved in ROV mode due to the tether cable. To accomplish its missions such as inspection and maintenance of complex underwater structures in AUV mode, the vehicle is required to have high level of autonomy including environmental recognition, obstacle avoidance, autonomous navigation, and so on. In addition to its systematic development issues, some of algorithmic issues are also discussed in this paper. Various experimental studies are also presented to demonstrate these developed autonomy algorithms.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Military Science and Technology
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• v.18 no.6
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• pp.711-720
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• 2015

Recently many studies of Radar systems mounted on ground vehicles for autonomous driving, SLAM (Simultaneous localization and mapping) and collision avoidance have been reported. Since several pixels per an object may be generated in a close-range radar application, a width of an object can be estimated automatically by various signal processing techniques. In this paper, we tried to attempt to develop an algorithm to estimate obstacle width using Radar images. The proposed method consists of 5 steps - 1) background clutter reduction, 2) local peak pixel detection, 3) region growing, 4) contour extraction and 5)width calculation. For the performance validation of our method, we performed the test width estimation using a real data of two cars acquired by commercial radar system - I200 manufactured by Navtech. As a result, we verified that the proposed method can estimate the widths of targets.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.19 no.10
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• pp.907-914
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• 2013

A FastSLAM is an algorithm for SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) using a Rao-Blackwellized particle filter and its performance is known to degenerate over time due to the loss of particle diversity, mainly caused by the particle depletion problem in the resampling phase. In this paper, the GeSPIR (Geographically Stratified Particle Information-based Resampling) technique is proposed to solve the particle depletion problem. The proposed algorithm consists of the following four steps : the first step involves the grouping of particles divided into K regions, the second obtaining the normal weight of each region, the third specifying the protected areas, and the fourth resampling using regional equalization weight. Simulations show that the proposed algorithm obtains lower RMS errors in both robot and feature positions than the conventional FastSLAM algorithm.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.22 no.12
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• pp.1021-1026
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• 2016

The graph-based SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) approach has been gaining much attention in SLAM research recently thanks to its ability to provide better maps and full trajectory estimations when compared to the filtering-based SLAM approach. Even though graph-based SLAM requires batch processing causing it to be computationally heavy, recent advancements in optimization and computing power enable it to run fast enough to be used in real-time. However, data association problems still require large amount of computation when building a pose graph. For example, to find loop closures it is necessary to consider the whole history of the robot trajectory and sensor data within the confident range. As a pose graph grows, the number of candidates to be searched also grows. It makes searching the loop closures a bottleneck when solving the SLAM problem. Our approach to alleviate this bottleneck is to sample a limited number of pose nodes in which loop closures are searched. We propose a heuristic for sampling pose nodes that are most advantageous to closing loops by providing a way of ranking pose nodes in order of usefulness for closing loops.

• Journal of KIBIM
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.1-8
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• 2020

In managing building facilities, spatial information is the basic data for decision making. However, the method of acquiring spatial information is not easy. In many cases, the site and drawings are often different due to changes in facilities and time after construction. In this case, the site data should be scanned to obtain spatial information. The scan data actually contains spatial information, which is a great help in making space related decisions. However, to obtain scan data, an expensive LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) device must be purchased, and special software for processing data obtained from the device must be available.Recently, SLAM (Simultaneous localization and mapping), an advanced map generation technology, has been spreading in the field of robotics. Using SLAM, 3D spatial information can be obtained quickly in real time without a separate matching process. This study develops and tests whether SLAM technology can be used to obtain spatial information for facility management. This draws considerations for developing a SLAM device for real-time remote scanning for facility management. However, this study focuses on the system development method that acquires spatial information necessary for facility management through SLAM technology. To this end, we develop a prototype, analyze the pros and cons, and then suggest considerations for developing a SLAM system.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.15 no.6
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• pp.619-625
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• 2009

FastSLAM which uses the Rao-Blackwellized particle filter is one of the famous solutions to SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) problem that estimates concurrently a robot's pose and surrounding environment. However, the particle depletion problem arises from the loss of the particle diversity in the resampling process of FastSLAM. Then, the performance of FastSLAM degenerates over the time. In this work, DIR (Density Information-based Resampling) technique is proposed to solve the particle depletion problem. First, the cluster is constructed based on the density of each particle, and the density of each cluster is computed. After that, the number of particles to be reserved in each cluster is determined using a linear method based on the distance between the highest density cluster and each cluster. Finally, the resampling process is performed by rejecting the particles which are not selected to be reserved in each cluster. The performance of the DIR proposed to solve the particle depletion problem in FastSLAM was verified in computer simulations, which significantly reduced both the RMS position error and the feature error.