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Research Projects
Map Building by Means of Appearance Visual Systems for Robot Navigation
Title: Map Building by Means of Appearance Visual Systems for Robot Navigation Funded by: CICYT Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación
Duration: 01/01/2017 al 31/12/2019
Description: 
In order to be truly autonomous, a mobile robot should be capable of navigating through any kind of environment while carrying out a task. In order to do that it is considered necessary that the robot possesses the ability to create a model of its workspace that allows to estimate its position inside it and navigate along a trajectory.
Map building and navigation is currently a very active research area, in which a large number of researchers focus on and where very different approaches have emerged based on diverse algorithms and using various kind of sensorial information. To the present days, most of the efforts have been focusing on construction of models of the environment based on a set of significant points extracted from it without considering the global appearance of the scene.
Considering the concepts posed above, we propose the improvement and development of new mechanisms that allow an efficient, robust and precise modelling of the environment by making use of omnidirectional vision systems. The research group has experience in the mentioned areas and during the last years has developed different approaches in the areas of map building, localization, exploration and SLAM by means of information gathered by different kind of vision systems installed on the robots. In order to carry out these approaches, an extensive study of the different description methods has been performed, both based on the extraction of significant points and local descriptors and also those methods based on the global appearance of the image, with remarkable results.
Keywords: Mobile robots, autonomous navigation, computer vision, omnidirectional systems
Head Researcher: L. Payá, O. Reinoso More Information...
NAVICOM
Title: Robotic Navigation in Dynamic Environments by means of Compact Maps with Global Appearance Visual Information Funded by: CICYT Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación
Duration: 01/09/2014 al 31/05/2017
Description:
Carrying out a task by a team of mobile robots that move across an unknown environment is one of the open research lines with a higher scope for a large development in the mid-term. In order to accomplish this task it has been proved necessary to possess a highly detailed map of the environment that will allow the localization of the robots as they execute a particular task. During the last years the proposer research team has worked with remarkable results in the field of SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) with teams of mobile robots. The work has considered the use of robots equipped with cameras and the inclusion of the visual information gathered in order to build map models. So far, different kind of maps have been built, including metric maps based on visual landmarks, as well as topological maps base on global appearance-based information extracted from images.
These maps have allowed the navigation of the robots in these maps as well as the performance of high level tasks in the environment. Nonetheless, there exists space for improvement in several areas related to the research carried out so far. Currently, one of the important problems consists in the treatment of the visual information and the updating of this information as the environment changes gradually. In addition, the maps should be created considering the dynamic and static part of the environment (for example when other mobile robots or people move in the environment), thus leading to the creation of more realistic models, as well as strategies to update the maps as changes are detected. A different research line considers the creation of maps that combine simultaneously the information about the topology of the environment, as well as semantic and metric information that will allow a more effective localization of the robot in large environments and, in addition, will enable a hierarchical localization in these maps. The proposed research project considers to tackle the aforementioned lines, thus considering the task of developing dynamic visual maps that will incorporate the semantic and topological structure of the environment, as well as the metric information when the robots perform trajectories with 6 degrees of freedom.
Keywords: Mobile Robots, Visual Maps, Topological and Compact Navigation, Visual SLAM
Head Researcher: A. Gil, O. Reinoso More Information...
Localización y Creación de Mapas Visuales para Navegación de Robots con 6 GDL
Title: Localización y Creación de Mapas Visuales para Navegación de Robots con 6 GDL Funded by: Generalitat Valenciana
Duration: Enero 2015 - Dic 2016
Description:
La realización de tareas por parte de robots móviles que se desenvuelven por un entorno desconocido es una de las líneas de investigación abiertas en la actualidad y que previsiblemente tendrá mayor repercusión a medio plazo. Para ello es necesario poder tener como referencia una información lo más precisa y detallada posible con objeto de que el robot o los robots que se encuentran ejecutando una determinada tarea pueden localizarse dentro del entorno de trabajo. Durante los últimos años se ha trabajado de forma notable y con excelente resultados en esta línea de investigación de creación de mapas de entornos a través de los cuales se pudieran localizar los robots en un proceso conjunto (Simultaneous Localization And Mapping). El grupo de investigación proponente se ha centrado durante los últimos años en esta línea de investigación teniendo como datos de partida para la creación del mapa, la información visual de cada uno de los sistemas de visión con que cuenten los robots. A partir de esta información visual, se extraen mapas métricos con objeto de que los robots puedan localizarse y desarrollar tareas de navegación de una forma lo más precisa posible.
Es en este ámbito donde se centra el presente proyecto de investigación, en el que a partir de los resultados alcanzados hasta el momento se plantea acometer nuevas líneas de investigación consistentes en desarrollar mapas visuales dinámicos teniendo en cuenta la información semántica y topológica aportada por los sistemas de visión todo ello en entornos de 6 grados de libertad.
Keywords: Visual SLAM applied to 6DOF robotics
Head Researcher: L.M. Jiménez More Information...
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