The system design and algorithm development of mobile 3D printing robots need a realistic simulation. They require a mobile robot simulation platform to interoperate with a physics-based material simulation for handling interactions between the time-variant deformable 3D printing materials and other simulated rigid bodies in the environment, which is not available for roboticists yet. To bridge this gap and enable the real-time simulation of mobile 3D printing processes, we develop a simulation framework that includes particle-based viscoelastic fluid simulation and particle-to-mesh conversion in the widely adopted Gazebo robotics simulator, avoiding the bottlenecks of traditional additive manufacturing simulation approaches. This framework is the first of its kind that enables the simulation of robot arms or mobile manipulators together with viscoelastic fluids. The method is tested using various material properties and multiple collaborating robots to demonstrate its simulation ability for the robots to plan and control the printhead trajectories and to visually sense at the same time the printed fluid materials as a free-form mesh. The scalability as a function of available material particles in the simulation was also studied. A simulation with an average of 5 FPS was achieved on a regular desktop computer.
We exploit the complementary strengths of vision and proprioception to achieve point goal navigation in a legged robot. Legged systems are capable of traversing more complex terrain than wheeled robots, but to fully exploit this capability, we need the high-level path planner in the navigation system to be aware of the walking capabilities of the low-level locomotion policy on varying terrains. We achieve this by using proprioceptive feedback to estimate the safe operating limits of the walking policy, and to sense unexpected obstacles and terrain properties like smoothness or softness of the ground that may be missed by vision. The navigation system uses onboard cameras to generate an occupancy map and a corresponding cost map to reach the goal. The FMM (Fast Marching Method) planner then generates a target path. The velocity command generator takes this as input to generate the desired velocity for the locomotion policy using as input additional constraints, from the safety advisor, of unexpected obstacles and terrain determined speed limits. We show superior performance compared to wheeled robot (LoCoBot) baselines, and other baselines which have disjoint high-level planning and low-level control. We also show the real-world deployment of our system on a quadruped robot with onboard sensors and compute. Videos at //navigation-locomotion.github.io/camera-ready
Efficient optimization of topology and raster angle has shown unprecedented enhancements in the mechanical properties of 3D printed thermoplastic polymers. Topology optimization helps reduce the waste of raw material in the fabrication of 3D printed parts, thus decreasing production costs associated with manufacturing lighter structures. Fiber orientation plays an important role in increasing the stiffness of a structure. This paper develops and tests a new method for handling stress constraints in topology and fiber orientation optimization of 3D printed orthotropic structures. The stress constraints are coupled with an objective function that maximizes stiffness. This is accomplished by using the modified solid isotropic material with penalization method with the method of moving asymptotes as the optimizer. Each element has a fictitious density and an angle as the main design variables. To reduce the number of stress constraints and thus the computational cost, a new clustering strategy is employed in which the highest stresses in the principal material coordinates are grouped separately into two clusters using an adjusted $P$-norm. A detailed description of the formulation and sensitivity analysis is discussed. While we present an analysis of 2D structures in the numerical examples section, the method can also be used for 3D structures, as the formulation is generic. Our results show that this method can produce efficient structures suitable for 3D printing while avoiding stress concentrations.
We address the problem of ego-vehicle navigation in dense simulated traffic environments populated by road agents with varying driver behaviors. Navigation in such environments is challenging due to unpredictability in agents' actions caused by their heterogeneous behaviors. We present a new simulation technique consisting of enriching existing traffic simulators with behavior-rich trajectories corresponding to varying levels of aggressiveness. We generate these trajectories with the help of a driver behavior modeling algorithm. We then use the enriched simulator to train a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) policy that consists of a set of high-level vehicle control commands and use this policy at test time to perform local navigation in dense traffic. Our policy implicitly models the interactions between traffic agents and computes safe trajectories for the ego-vehicle accounting for aggressive driver maneuvers such as overtaking, over-speeding, weaving, and sudden lane changes. Our enhanced behavior-rich simulator can be used for generating datasets that consist of trajectories corresponding to diverse driver behaviors and traffic densities, and our behavior-based navigation scheme can be combined with state-of-the-art navigation algorithms.
The Robotics community has started to heavily rely on increasingly realistic 3D simulators for large-scale training of robots on massive amounts of data. But once robots are deployed in the real world, the simulation gap, as well as changes in the real world (e.g. lights, objects displacements) lead to errors. In this paper, we introduce Sim2RealViz, a visual analytics tool to assist experts in understanding and reducing this gap for robot ego-pose estimation tasks, i.e. the estimation of a robot's position using trained models. Sim2RealViz displays details of a given model and the performance of its instances in both simulation and real-world. Experts can identify environment differences that impact model predictions at a given location and explore through direct interactions with the model hypothesis to fix it. We detail the design of the tool, and case studies related to the exploit of the regression to the mean bias and how it can be addressed, and how models are perturbed by the vanish of landmarks such as bikes.
We present a fully automated method of integrating intraoral scan (IOS) and dental cone-beam computerized tomography (CBCT) images into one image by complementing each image's weaknesses. Dental CBCT alone may not be able to delineate precise details of the tooth surface due to limited image resolution and various CBCT artifacts, including metal-induced artifacts. IOS is very accurate for the scanning of narrow areas, but it produces cumulative stitching errors during full-arch scanning. The proposed method is intended not only to compensate the low-quality of CBCT-derived tooth surfaces with IOS, but also to correct the cumulative stitching errors of IOS across the entire dental arch. Moreover, the integration provide both gingival structure of IOS and tooth roots of CBCT in one image. The proposed fully automated method consists of four parts; (i) individual tooth segmentation and identification module for IOS data (TSIM-IOS); (ii) individual tooth segmentation and identification module for CBCT data (TSIM-CBCT); (iii) global-to-local tooth registration between IOS and CBCT; and (iv) stitching error correction of full-arch IOS. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieved landmark and surface distance errors of 0.11mm and 0.30mm, respectively.
Latest deep learning methods for object detection provide remarkable performance, but have limits when used in robotic applications. One of the most relevant issues is the long training time, which is due to the large size and imbalance of the associated training sets, characterized by few positive and a large number of negative examples (i.e. background). Proposed approaches are based on end-to-end learning by back-propagation [22] or kernel methods trained with Hard Negatives Mining on top of deep features [8]. These solutions are effective, but prohibitively slow for on-line applications. In this paper we propose a novel pipeline for object detection that overcomes this problem and provides comparable performance, with a 60x training speedup. Our pipeline combines (i) the Region Proposal Network and the deep feature extractor from [22] to efficiently select candidate RoIs and encode them into powerful representations, with (ii) the FALKON [23] algorithm, a novel kernel-based method that allows fast training on large scale problems (millions of points). We address the size and imbalance of training data by exploiting the stochastic subsampling intrinsic into the method and a novel, fast, bootstrapping approach. We assess the effectiveness of the approach on a standard Computer Vision dataset (PASCAL VOC 2007 [5]) and demonstrate its applicability to a real robotic scenario with the iCubWorld Transformations [18] dataset.
Lidar based 3D object detection is inevitable for autonomous driving, because it directly links to environmental understanding and therefore builds the base for prediction and motion planning. The capacity of inferencing highly sparse 3D data in real-time is an ill-posed problem for lots of other application areas besides automated vehicles, e.g. augmented reality, personal robotics or industrial automation. We introduce Complex-YOLO, a state of the art real-time 3D object detection network on point clouds only. In this work, we describe a network that expands YOLOv2, a fast 2D standard object detector for RGB images, by a specific complex regression strategy to estimate multi-class 3D boxes in Cartesian space. Thus, we propose a specific Euler-Region-Proposal Network (E-RPN) to estimate the pose of the object by adding an imaginary and a real fraction to the regression network. This ends up in a closed complex space and avoids singularities, which occur by single angle estimations. The E-RPN supports to generalize well during training. Our experiments on the KITTI benchmark suite show that we outperform current leading methods for 3D object detection specifically in terms of efficiency. We achieve state of the art results for cars, pedestrians and cyclists by being more than five times faster than the fastest competitor. Further, our model is capable of estimating all eight KITTI-classes, including Vans, Trucks or sitting pedestrians simultaneously with high accuracy.
This paper deals with the reality gap from a novel perspective, targeting transferring Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) policies learned in simulated environments to the real-world domain for visual control tasks. Instead of adopting the common solutions to the problem by increasing the visual fidelity of synthetic images output from simulators during the training phase, this paper seeks to tackle the problem by translating the real-world image streams back to the synthetic domain during the deployment phase, to make the robot feel at home. We propose this as a lightweight, flexible, and efficient solution for visual control, as 1) no extra transfer steps are required during the expensive training of DRL agents in simulation; 2) the trained DRL agents will not be constrained to being deployable in only one specific real-world environment; 3) the policy training and the transfer operations are decoupled, and can be conducted in parallel. Besides this, we propose a conceptually simple yet very effective shift loss to constrain the consistency between subsequent frames, eliminating the need for optical flow. We validate the shift loss for artistic style transfer for videos and domain adaptation, and validate our visual control approach in real-world robot experiments. A video of our results is available at: //goo.gl/b1xz1s.
In this work, we present a method for tracking and learning the dynamics of all objects in a large scale robot environment. A mobile robot patrols the environment and visits the different locations one by one. Movable objects are discovered by change detection, and tracked throughout the robot deployment. For tracking, we extend the Rao-Blackwellized particle filter of previous work with birth and death processes, enabling the method to handle an arbitrary number of objects. Target births and associations are sampled using Gibbs sampling. The parameters of the system are then learnt using the Expectation Maximization algorithm in an unsupervised fashion. The system therefore enables learning of the dynamics of one particular environment, and of its objects. The algorithm is evaluated on data collected autonomously by a mobile robot in an office environment during a real-world deployment. We show that the algorithm automatically identifies and tracks the moving objects within 3D maps and infers plausible dynamics models, significantly decreasing the modeling bias of our previous work. The proposed method represents an improvement over previous methods for environment dynamics learning as it allows for learning of fine grained processes.
Finding Tiny Faces by Hu and Ramanan - and released at CVPR 2017 - proposes a novel approach to find small objects in an image. Our contribution consists in deeply understanding the choices of the paper together with applying and extending a similar method to a real world subject which is the counting of people in a public demonstration.