MSc dissertation proposal 2019/2020

Visual Navigation for Flying over Stairways

Introduction:

Stairways are still a challenge for home surveillance robots. Vision sensors allow navigating by tracking environmental features.

Exploring the structure of stairways is an objective of this dissertation proposal. In addition to considering the structure of stairways, it is also desired a simpler setting of detecting multiple straight lines whose 3D poses is unknown.

Detailed description:

Alternatively, to scene 3D reconstruction works as in [Pereira14, Mendonça14], the objective in this work proposal is to do feature-based navigation as in [Ribeiro13, Tomaz13, Cruz15].

In this proposal is considered that the robot acquires information in a first run and then the acquired information is used to navigate the robot.

The work is organized in the following main steps:

1) Describing geometrically the stairway such that the straight lines server as visual navigation features

2) Use a drone, e.g. Parrot Spider or Mambo, to acquire video of a stairway between two or three floors

3) Navigate the robot autonomously between floors going along the stairway

References:

[Pereira14] Robotic Home Sentinel, David Pereira, MSc thesis, MEEC/IST, 2014

[Mendonça14] Omni-Telepresence using Mobile Robots, José Mendonça, MSc thesis, MEEC/IST, 2014

[Ribeiro13] Nomadic Surveillance Camera, Nuno Ribeiro, MSc Thesis, MEEC/IST, 2012/2013

[Tomaz13] Visual Self-Localization and Mapping Using the Inside Texture of a Tubular Structure, João Tomaz, MSc Thesis, MEEC/IST, 2012/2013

[Cruz15] Wireless Mobile Camera, João Cruz, MSc Thesis, MEEC/IST, 2014/2015

Expected results:

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

* Computer vision

Observations:

Current grade equal or larger than 15 values.

More MSc dissertation proposals on Computer and Robot Vision in:

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