VPS-SLAM: Visual Planar Semantic SLAM for Aerial Robotic Systems

Indoor environments have abundant presence of high-level semantic information which can provide a better understanding of the environment for robots to improve the uncertainty in their pose estimate. Although semantic information has proved to be useful, there are several challenges faced by the res...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Bavle, H., De La Puente, P., How, J. P., Campoy, P.
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2020
País:España
Institución:Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC)
Repositorio:DIGITAL.CSIC. Repositorio Institucional del CSIC
OAI Identifier:oai:digital.csic.es:10261/220034
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/10261/220034
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:SLAM
Visual SLAM
Visual semantic SLAM
Autonomous aerial robots
UAVs
Three-dimensional displays
Descripción
Sumario:Indoor environments have abundant presence of high-level semantic information which can provide a better understanding of the environment for robots to improve the uncertainty in their pose estimate. Although semantic information has proved to be useful, there are several challenges faced by the research community to accurately perceive, extract and utilize such semantic information from the environment. In order to address these challenges, in this paper we present a lightweight and real-time visual semantic SLAM framework running on board aerial robotic platforms. This novel method combines low-level visual/visual-inertial odometry (VO/VIO) along with geometrical information corresponding to planar surfaces extracted from detected semantic objects. Extracting the planar surfaces from selected semantic objects provides enhanced robustness and makes it possible to precisely improve the metric estimates rapidly, simultaneously generalizing to several object instances irrespective of their shape and size. Our graph-based approach can integrate several state of the art VO/VIO algorithms along with the state of the art object detectors in order to estimate the complete 6DoF pose of the robot while simultaneously creating a sparse semantic map of the environment. No prior knowledge of the objects is required, which is a significant advantage over other works. We test our approach on a standard RGB-D dataset comparing its performance with the state of the art SLAM algorithms. We also perform several challenging indoor experiments validating our approach in presence of distinct environmental conditions and furthermore test it on board an aerial robot.