Active perception approaches select future viewpoints by using some estimate of the information gain. An inaccurate estimate can be detrimental in critical situations, e.g., locating a person in distress. However the true information gained can only be calculated post hoc, i.e., after the observation is realized. We present an approach to estimate the discrepancy between the estimated information gain (which is the expectation over putative future observations while neglecting correlations among them) and the true information gain. The key idea is to analyze the mathematical relationship between active perception and the estimation error of the information gain in a gametheoretic setting. Using this, we develop an online estimation approach that achieves sub-linear regret (in the number of timesteps) for the estimation of the true information gain and reduces the sub-optimality of active perception systems. We demonstrate our approach11Code is available at https://github.com/grasp-lyd/active-perception-game. Proofs are available at https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.00769.for active perception using a comprehensive set of experiments on: (a) different types of environments, including a quadrotor in a photorealistic simulation, real-world robotic data, and real-world experiments with ground robots exploring indoor and outdoor scenes; (b) different types of robotic perception data; and (c) different map representations. On average, our approach reduces information gain estimation errors by 42%, increases the information gain by 7%, PSNR by 5%, and semantic accuracy (measured as the number of objects that are localized correctly) by 6%. In real-world experiments with a Jackal ground robot, our approach demonstrated complex trajectories to explore occluded regions.

This paper develops a real-time decentralized metric-semantic SLAM algorithm that enables a heterogeneous robot team to collaboratively construct object-based metric-semantic maps. The proposed framework integrates a data-driven front-end for instance segmentation from either RGBD cameras or LiDARs and a custom back-end for optimizing robot trajectories and object landmarks in the map. To allow multiple robots to merge their information, we design semantics-driven place recognition algorithms that leverage the informativeness and viewpoint invariance of the object-level metric-semantic map for inter-robot loop closure detection. A communication module is designed to track each robot's observations and those of other robots whenever communication links are available. The framework supports real-time, decentralized operation onboard the robots and has been integrated with three types of aerial and ground platforms. We validate its effectiveness through experiments in both indoor and outdoor environments, as well as benchmarks on public datasets and comparisons with existing methods. The framework is open-sourced and suitable for both single-agent and multi-robot real-time metric-semantic SLAM applications.

Trajectory generation for quadrotors with limited field-of-view sensors has numerous applications such as aerial exploration, coverage, inspection, videography, and target tracking. Most previous works simplify the task of optimizing yaw trajectories by either aligning the heading of the robot with its velocity, or potentially restricting the feasible space of candidate trajectories by using a limited yaw domain to circumvent angular singularities. In this paper, we propose a novel global yaw parameterization method for trajectory optimization that allows a 360-degree yaw variation as demanded by the underlying algorithm. This approach effectively bypasses inherent singularities by including supplementary quadratic constraints and transforming the final decision variables into the desired state representation. This method significantly reduces the needed control effort, and improves optimization feasibility. Furthermore, we apply the method to several examples of different applications that require jointly optimizing over both the yaw and position trajectories. Ultimately, we present a comprehensive numerical analysis and evaluation of our proposed method in both simulation and real-world experiments.

Planning time-optimal trajectories for quadrotors in cluttered environments is a challenging, non-convex problem. This paper addresses minimizing the traversal time of a given collision-free geometric path without violating actuation bounds of the vehicle. Previous approaches have either relied on convex relaxations that do not guarantee dynamic feasibility or have generated overly conservative time parametrizations. We propose TOPPQuad, a time-optimal path parameterization algorithm for quadrotors which explicitly incorporates quadrotor rigid body dynamics and constraints, such as bounds on inputs (including motor thrusts) and state of the vehicle (including the pose, linear and angular velocity and acceleration). We demonstrate the ability of the planner to generate faster trajectories that respect hardware constraints of the robot compared to planners with relaxed notions of dynamic feasibility in both simulation and hardware. We also demonstrate how TOPPQuad can be used to plan trajectories for quadrotors that utilize bidirectional motors. Overall, the proposed approach paves a way towards maximizing the efficacy of autonomous micro aerial vehicles while ensuring their safety.

This paper addresses the problem of active collaborative localization in heterogeneous robot teams with unknown data association. It involves positioning a small number of identical unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) at desired positions so that an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) can, through unlabelled measurements of UGVs, uniquely determine its global pose. We model the problem as a sequential two player game, in which the first player positions the UGVs and the second identifies the two distinct hypothetical poses of the UAV at which the sets of measurements to the UGVs differ by as little as possible. We solve the underlying problem from the vantage point of the first player for a subclass of measurement models using a mixture of local optimization and exhaustive search procedures. Real-world experiments with a team of UAV and UGVs show that our method can achieve centimeter-level global localization accuracy. We also show that our method consistently outperforms random positioning of UGVs by a large margin, with as much as a 90% reduction in position and angular estimation error. Our method can tolerate a significant amount of random as well as non-stochastic measurement noise. This indicates its potential for reliable state estimation on board size, weight, and power (SWaP) constrained UAVs. This work enables robust localization in perceptually-challenged GPS-denied environments, thus paving the road for large-scale multi-robot navigation and mapping.

We consider joint trajectory generation and tracking control for under-actuated robotic systems. A common solution is to use a layered control architecture, where the top layer uses a simplified model of system dynamics for trajectory generation, and the low layer ensures approximate tracking of this trajectory via feedback control. While such layered control architectures are standard and work well in practice, selecting the simplified model used for trajectory generation typically relies on engineering intuition and experience. In this paper, we propose an alternative data-driven approach to dynamicsaware trajectory generation. We show that a suitable augmented Lagrangian reformulation of a global nonlinear optimal control problem results in a layered decomposition of the overall problem into trajectory planning and feedback control layers. Crucially, the resulting trajectory optimization is dynamicsaware, in that, it is modified with a tracking penalty regularizer encoding the dynamic feasibility of the generated trajectory. We show that this tracking penalty regularizer can be learned from system rollouts for independently-designed low layer feedback control policies, and instantiate our framework in the context of a unicycle and a quadrotor control problem in simulation. Further, we show that our approach handles the sim-to-real gap through experiments on the quadrotor hardware platform without any additional training. For both the synthetic unicycle example and the quadrotor system, our framework shows significant improvements in both computation time and dynamic feasibility in simulation and hardware experiments.

The increasing popularity of quadrotors has given rise to a class of predominantly vision-driven vehicles. This paper addresses the problem of perception-aware time optimal path parametrization for quadrotors. Although many different choices of perceptual modalities are available, the low weight and power budgets of quadrotor systems makes a camera ideal for on-board navigation and estimation algorithms. However, this does come with a set of challenges. The limited field of view of the camera can restrict the visibility of salient regions in the environment, which dictates the necessity to consider perception and planning jointly. The main contribution of this paper is an efficient time optimal path parametrization algorithm for quadrotors with limited field of view constraints. We show in a simulation study that a state-of-the-art controller can track planned trajectories, and we validate the proposed algorithm on a quadrotor platform in experiments.

We study a problem in vision-aided navigation in which an autonomous agent has to traverse a specified path in minimal time while ensuring extraction of a steady stream of visual percepts with low latency. Vision-aided robots extract motion estimates from the sequence of images of their on-board cameras by registering the change in bearing to landmarks in their environment. The computational burden of the latter procedure grows with the range of apparent motion undertaken by the projections of the landmarks, incurring a lag in pose estimates that should be minimized while navigating at high speeds. This paper addresses the problem of selecting a desired number of landmarks in the environment, together with the time parametrization of the path, to allow the agent execute it in minimal time while both (i) ensuring the computational burden of extracting motion estimates stays below a set threshold and (ii) respecting the actuation constraints of the agent. We provide two efficient approximation algorithms for addressing the aforementioned problem. Also, we show how it can be reduced to a mixed integer linear program for which there exist well-developed optimization packages. Ultimately, we illustrate the performance of our algorithms in experiments using a quadrotor.