Couchbase Capella is a scalable document-oriented database service in the cloud. Its existing Capella Operational service is based on a shared-nothing architecture and supports high volumes of low-latency queries and updates for JSON documents. Its new Capella Columnar cloud service complements the Operational service. The Capella Columnar service supports complex analytical queries (e.g., ad hoc joins and aggregations) over large collections of JSON documents that can originate from a variety of Couchbase and non-Couchbase data sources and formats and can either be stored and managed by the Capella Columnar service or externally stored and accessed on demand at query time. This paper describes the new Capella Columnar service, looking both over and under the hood.

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.

Data collection for forestry, timber, and agriculture relies on manual techniques which are labor-intensive and time-consuming. We seek to demonstrate that robotics offers improvements over these techniques and can accelerate agricultural research, beginning with semantic segmentation and diameter estimation of trees in forests and orchards. We present TreeScope v1.0, the first robotics dataset for precision agriculture and forestry addressing the counting and mapping of trees in forestry and orchards. TreeScope provides LiDAR data from agricultural environments collected with robotics platforms, such as UAV and mobile robot platforms carried by vehicles and human operators. In the first release of this dataset, we provide ground-truth data with over 1,800 manually annotated semantic labels for tree stems and field-measured tree diameters. We share benchmark scripts for these tasks that researchers may use to evaluate the accuracy of their algorithms. Finally, we run our open-source diameter estimation and off-the-shelf semantic segmentation algorithms and share our baseline results.The dataset can be found at https://treescope.org, and the data pre-processing and benchmark code is available at https://github.com/KumarRobotics/treescope.

Traditional approaches for active mapping focus on building geometric maps. For most real-world applications, however, actionable information is related to semantically meaningful objects in the environment. We propose an approach to the active metric-semantic mapping problem that enables multiple heterogeneous robots to collaboratively build a map of the environment. The robots actively explore to minimize the uncertainties in both semantic (object classification) and geometric (object modeling) information. We represent the environment using informative but sparse object models, each consisting of a basic shape and a semantic class label, and characterize uncertainties empirically using a large amount of real-world data. Given a prior map, we use this model to select actions for each robot to minimize uncertainties. The performance of our algorithm is demonstrated through multi-robot experiments in diverse real-world environments. The proposed framework is applicable to a wide range of real-world problems, such as precision agriculture, infrastructure inspection, and asset mapping in factories.

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.