Rovio mobile webcam, Pioneer P3-AT mobile robot, Octomap by K. Wurm et al, MS Kinect

MSc dissertation proposal 2012/2013

Omni-Telepresence using Mobile Robots

Introduction:

Future robots will be more than mere tools doing isolated tasks: they will be quasi-team members whose tasks have to be integrated with those of humans or other robots [HRI2007]. One of the key aspects of the integration is the ability of the robots to build scene representations useful for the robots to work not only individually, but also within teams or with humans. The scene representations have therefore to be expressive (non-redundant) to be understood by other robots, and to encompass features identifiable by humans.

Recent vision sensors, namely the Microsoft Kinect [MS-Kinect] comprising not only video but also depth information, promise to be sensors capable to provide the required high quality data allowing to construct the desired scene representations. This MSc project proposal is therefore mainly concerned with designing scene representations integrating video and depth information.

Note: this project is proposed in the framework of the European project RoboSoM (see http://www.robosom.eu/ ), having therefore the possibility of international cooperation and experiences exchanging.

Objectives:

The objectives of this work are twofold: (i) Building scene representations encompassing multiple data acquisitions done with the Kinect camera, and (ii) Creating fast browsing methodologies of the scene representations.

Detailed description:

Creating scene representations is nowadays facilitated by the recent introduction in the market of the MS Kinect camera [MS-Kinect] which provides not only visual information of the scenario, but also depth information (3D information). Integrating this 3D information is still an issue due mainly to the large amounts of data involved and the required (large) computational resources.

Some recent research works show that by choosing the proper scene representations it is possible to do data acquisition, processing and integration with a standard PC. One such reference is the work by Wurm et al [Wurm10], where a mobile robot maps a number of campuses. Another reference is the work by Shen et al [Shen11], where a flying robot (quadrotor) maps a multi-floor scenario using a Kinect camera (click here to see a video).

The referred works give conceptual starting points and software libraries which facilitate doing experiments. This constitutes therefore the starting point of the MSc project. Some other aspects involve doing data acquisition and displaying the resulting scenarios. An interesting point to explore involves using the acquired data for navigation experiments.

In summary, the work is organized in the following main steps:

1) data acquisition, implies moving the robot within the scene and capturing scene information

2) data integration into a single scene representation

3) demonstration of a virtual tour inside the scene representation or trajectory following with the robot

References:

[HRI2007] - 2nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, http://hri2007.org/

[Gaspar00] Vision-based Navigation and Environmental Representations with an Omnidirectional Camera, José Gaspar, Niall Winters, José Santos-Victor, IEEE Transaction on Robotics and Automation, Vol 16, number 6, December 2000

[ISR-galery] Some images of unicycle type robots at ISR: see labmate, scouts, pioneers, ... in "Mini galeria de fotografias de projectos @ IST/ISR", http://users.isr.ist.utl.pt/~jag/infoforum/isr_galeria/

[MS-Kinect] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinect

[Wurm10] Kai M. Wurm, Armin Hornung, Maren Bennewitz, Cyrill Stachniss, Wolfram Burgard, "OctoMap: A Probabilistic, Flexible, and Compact 3D Map Representation for Robotic Systems", in Proceedings of the ICRA 2010 Workshop on Best Practice in 3D Perception and Modeling for Mobile Manipulation, 2010, http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~wurm/papers/wurm10octomap.pdf

[Shen11] Shaojie Shen, Nathan Michael, and Vijay Kumar , "3D Indoor Exploration with a Computationally Constrained MAV", ICRA 2011. See also video in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOeCZDBHrJs&feature=channel_video_title

Expected results:

At the end of the work the students will have enriched their knowledge in:

* Computer vision

* Building scene representations for mobile robots

Observations:

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More MSc dissertation proposals on Computer and Robot Vision in:

http://omni.isr.ist.utl.pt/~jag