Structure-from-Motion (SfM) is the task of estimating 3D structure and camera poses from images. We define Collaborative SfM (ColabSfM) as sharing distributed SfM reconstructions. Sharing maps requires estimating a joint reference frame, which is typically referred to as registration. However, there is a lack of scalable methods and training datasets for registering SfM reconstructions. In this paper, we tackle this challenge by proposing the scalable task of point cloud registration for SfM reconstructions. We find that current registration methods cannot register SfM point clouds when trained on existing datasets. To this end, we propose a SfM registration dataset generation pipeline, leveraging partial reconstructions from synthetically generated camera trajectories for each scene. Finally, we propose a simple but impactful neural refiner on top of the SotA registration method RoITr that yields significant improvements, which we call RefineRoITr. Our extensive experimental evaluation shows that our proposed pipeline and model enables ColabSfM. Code is available at https://github.com/EricssonResearch/ColabSfM

In the Industry 4.0 era, a myriad of sensors of diverse nature (temperature, pressure, etc.) is spreading throughout the entire value chain of industries, being potentially exploitable for multiple purposes, such as Predictive Maintenance (PdM): the just-in-time maintenance of industrial assets, which results in reduced operating costs, increased operator safety, etc. Nowadays, industrial processes require to be highly configurable, in order to proactively adapt their operation to diverse factors such as user needs, product updates or supply chain uncertainties. This limits current Industry 4.0-PdM solutions, typically consisting of ad-hoc developments intended for specific scenarios, i.e. they are designed to operate under certain conditions (configurations, employed sensors, etc.), being unable to manage changes in their setup. This paper presents a general Deep Learning (DL) architecture, MachNet, which deals with such heterogeneity and is able to address PdM problems of a diverse nature. The modularity of the proposed architecture enables it to deal with an arbitrary number of sensors of different types, also allowing the integration of prior information (age of assets, material type, etc.), which clearly affects performance and is often neglected. In practice, our architecture effortlessly adapts to the assets’ specifications and to different PdM problems. That is, MachNet becomes an architectural template that can be instantiated for a given scenario. We tested our proposal in two different PdM-related problems: Health State (HS) and Remaining-useful-Life (RuL) estimation, achieving in both cases comparable or superior performance to other state-of-the-art approaches, with the additional advantage of the generality that MachNet offers.

Simulations and synthetic datasets have historically empower the research in different service robotics-related problems, being revamped nowadays with the utilization of rich virtual environments. However, with their use, special attention must be paid so the resulting algorithms are not biased by the synthetic data and can generalize to real world conditions. These aspects are usually compromised when the virtual environments are manually designed. This article presents Robot@VirtualHome, an ecosystem of virtual environments and tools that allows for the management of realistic virtual environments where robotic simulations can be performed. Here “realistic” means that those environments have been designed by mimicking the rooms’ layout and objects appearing in 30 real houses, hence not being influenced by the designer’s knowledge. The provided virtual environments are highly customizable (lighting conditions, textures, objects’ models, etc.), accommodate meta-information about the elements appearing therein (objects’ types, room categories and layouts, etc.), and support the inclusion of virtual service robots and sensors. To illustrate the possibilities of Robot@VirtualHome we show how it has been used to collect a synthetic dataset, and also exemplify how to exploit it to successfully face two service robotics-related problems: semantic mapping and appearance-based localization.

This paper describes a method that corrects errors of a VSLAM-estimated trajectory for cars driving in GPS-denied environments, by applying constraints from public databases of geo-tagged images (Google Street View, Mapillary, etc). The method, dubbed Appearance-based Geo-Alignment for Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (AGA-SLAM), encodes the available image database as an appearance map, which represents the space with a compact holistic descriptor for each image plus its associated geo-tag. The VSLAM trajectory is corrected on-line by incorporating constraints from the recognized places along the trajectory into a position-based optimization framework. The paper presents a seamless formulation to combine local and absolute metric observations with associations from Visual Place Recognition. The robustness of the holistic image descriptor to changes due to weather or illumination variations ensures a long-term consistent method to improve car localization. The proposed method has been extensively evaluated on more than 70 sequences from 4 different datasets, proving out its effectiveness and endurance to appearance challenges.