Robots rely on visual relocalization to estimate their pose from camera images when they lose track. One of the challenges in visual relocalization is repetitive structures in the operation environment of the robot. This calls for probabilistic methods that support multiple hypotheses for robot’s pose. We propose such a probabilistic method to predict the posterior distribution of camera poses given an observed image. Our proposed training strategy results in a generative model of camera poses given an image, which can be used to draw samples from the pose posterior distribution. Our method is streamlined and well-founded in theory and outperforms existing methods on localization in presence of ambiguities.

Visual localization allows autonomous robots to relocalize when losing track of their pose by matching their current observation with past ones. However, ambiguous scenes pose a challenge for such systems, as repetitive structures can be viewed from many distinct, equally likely camera poses, which means it is not sufficient to produce a single best pose hypothesis. In this work, we propose a probabilistic framework that for a given image predicts the arbitrarily shaped posterior distribution of its camera pose. We do this via a novel formulation of camera pose regression using variational inference, which allows sampling from the predicted distribution. Our method outperforms existing methods on localization in ambiguous scenes. We open-source our approach and share our recorded data sequence at github.com/efreidun/vapor.

Scene understanding is paramount in robotics, self-navigation, augmented reality, and many other fields. To fully accomplish this task, an autonomous agent has to infer the 3D structure of the sensed scene (to know where it looks at) and its content (to know what it sees). To tackle the two tasks, deep neural networks trained to infer semantic segmentation and depth from stereo images are often the preferred choices. Specifically, Semantic Stereo Matching can be tackled by either standalone models trained for the two tasks independently or joint end-to-end architectures. Nonetheless, as proposed so far, both solutions are inefficient because requiring two forward passes in the former case or due to the complexity of a single network in the latter, although jointly tackling both tasks is usually beneficial in terms of accuracy. In this paper, we propose a single compact and lightweight architecture for real-time semantic stereo matching. Our framework relies on coarse-to-fine estimations in a multi-stage fashion, allowing: i) very fast inference even on embedded devices, with marginal drops in accuracy, compared to state-of-the-art networks, ii) trade accuracy for speed, according to the specific application requirements. Experimental results on high-end GPUs as well as on an embedded Jetson TX2 confirm the superiority of semantic stereo matching compared to standalone tasks and highlight the versatility of our framework on any hardware and for any application.

Estimating depth from a single image represents an attractive alternative to more traditional approaches leveraging multiple cameras. In this field, deep learning yielded outstanding results at the cost of needing large amounts of data labeled with precise depth measurements for training. An issue softened by self-supervised approaches leveraging monocular sequences or stereo pairs in place of expensive ground truth depth annotations. This paper enables to further improve monocular depth estimation by integrating into existing self-supervised networks a geometrical prior. Specifically, we propose a sparsity-invariant autoencoder able to process the output of conventional visual odometry algorithms working in synergy with depth-from-mono networks. Experimental results on the KITTI dataset show that by exploiting the geometrical prior, our proposal: i) outperforms existing approaches in the literature and ii) couples well with both compact and complex depth-from-mono architectures, allowing for its deployment on high-end GPUs as well as on embedded devices (e.g., NVIDIA Jetson TX2).

Humans interact with deformable objects on a daily basis but this still represents a challenge for robots. To enable manipulation of and interaction with deformable objects, robots need to be able to extract and learn the deformability of objects both prior to and during the interaction. Physics-based models are commonly used to predict the physical properties of deformable objects and simulate their deformation accurately. The most popular simulation techniques are force-based models that need force measurements. In this paper, we explore the applicability of a geometry-based simulation method called meshless shape matching (MSM) for estimating the deformability of objects. The main advantages of MSM are its controllability and computational efficiency that make it popular in computer graphics to simulate complex interactions of multiple objects at the same time. Additionally, a useful feature of the MSM that differentiates it from other physics-based simulation is to be independent of force measurements that may not be available to a robotic framework lacking force/torque sensors. In this work, we design a method to estimate deformability based on certain properties, such as volume conservation. Using the finite element method (FEM) we create the ground truth deformability for various settings to evaluate our method. The experimental evaluation shows that our approach is able to accurately identify the deformability of test objects, supporting the value of MSM for robotic applications.

This work employs an adaptive learning mechanism to perform tracking of an unknown object through RGBD cameras. We extend our previous framework to robustly track a wider range of arbitrarily shaped objects by adapting the model to the measured object size. The size is estimated as the object undergoes motion, which is done by fitting an inscribed cuboid to the measurements. The region spanned by this cuboid is used during tracking, to determine whether or not new measurements should be added to the object model. In our experiments we test our tracker with a set of objects of arbitrary shape and we show the benefit of the proposed model due to its ability to adapt to the object shape which leads to more robust tracking results.

Visual tracking of unknown objects is an essential task in robotic perception, of importance to a wide range of applications. In the general scenario, the robot has no full 3D model of the object beforehand, just the partial view of the object visible in the first video frame. A tracker with this information only will inevitably lose track of the object after occlusions or large out-of-plane rotations. The way to overcome this is to incrementally learn the appearances of new views of the object. However, this bootstrapping approach is sensitive to drifting due to occasional inclusion of the background into the model.

Humans are able to merge information from multiple perceptional modalities and formulate a coherent representation of the world. Our thesis is that robots need to do the same in order to operate robustly and autonomously in an unstructured environment. It has also been shown in several fields that multiple sources of information can complement each other, overcoming the limitations of a single perceptual modality. Hence, in this paper we introduce a data set of actions that includes both visual data (RGB-D video and 6DOF object pose estimation) and acoustic data. We also propose a method for recognizing and segmenting actions from continuous audio-visual data. The proposed method is employed for extensive evaluation of the descriptive power of the two modalities, and we discuss how they can be used jointly to infer a coherent interpretation of the recorded action.

In order for robots to function in unstructured environments in interaction with humans, they must be able to reason about the world in a semantic meaningful way. An essential capability is to segment the world into semantic plausible object hypotheses. In this paper we propose a general framework which can be used for reasoning about objects and their functionality in manipulation activities. Our system employs a hierarchical segmentation framework that extracts object hypotheses from RGB-D video. Motivated by cognitive studies on humans, our work leverages on contextual information, e.g., that objects obey the laws of physics, to formulate object hypotheses from regions in a mathematically principled manner.

The ability to learn from human demonstration is essential for robots in human environments. The activity models that the robot builds from observation must take both the human motion and the objects involved into account. Object models designed for this purpose should reflect the role of the object in the activity - its function, or affordances. The main contribution of this paper is to represent object directly in terms of their interaction with human hands, rather than in terms of appearance. This enables the direct representation of object affordances/function, while being robust to intra-class differences in appearance. Object hypotheses are first extracted from a video sequence as tracks of associated image segments. The object hypotheses are encoded as strings, where the vocabulary corresponds to different types of interaction with human hands. The similarity between two such object descriptors can be measured using a string kernel. Experiments show these functional descriptors to capture differences and similarities in object affordances/function that are not represented by appearance.