Triangle mesh maps are a versatile 3D environment representation for robots to navigate in challenging indoor and outdoor environments exhibiting tunnels, hills and varying slopes. To make use of these mesh maps, methods are needed to accurately localize robots in such maps to perform essential tasks like path planning and navigation. We present Mesh ICP Localization (MICP-L), a novel and computationally efficient method for registering one or more range sensors to a triangle mesh map to continuously localize a robot in 6D, even in GPS-denied environments. We accelerate the computation of ray casting correspondences (RCC) between range sensors and mesh maps by supporting different parallel computing devices like multicore CPUs, GPUs and the latest NVIDIA RTX hardware. By additionally transforming the covariance computation into a reduction operation, we can optimize the initial guessed poses in parallel on CPUs or GPUs, making our implementation applicable in real-time on many architectures. We demonstrate the robustness of our localization approach with datasets from agricultural, aerial, and automotive domains.

Sensor simulation has emerged as a promising and powerful technique to find solutions to many real-world robotic tasks like localization and pose tracking. However, commonly used simulators have high hardware requirements and are therefore used mostly on high-end computers. In this paper, we present an approach to simulate range sensors directly on embedded hardware of mobile robots that use triangle meshes as environment map. This library, called Rmagine, allows a robot to simulate sensor data for arbitrary range sensors directly on board via ray tracing. Since robots typically only have limited computational resources, Rmagine aims at being flexible and lightweight, while scaling well even to large environment maps. It runs on several platforms like Laptops or embedded computing boards like NVIDIA Jetson by putting an unified API over the specific proprietary libraries provided by the hardware manufacturers. This work is designed to support the future development of robotic applications depending on simulation of range data that could previously not be computed in reasonable time on mobile systems.

Changes in topological spatial relations of objects are often strong indicators for state transitions in the underlying processes they are involved in. While various aspects of semantic mapping have been extensively researched, the reasoning about the temporal development of spatial relations of instances is often neglected. This paper presents a concept to combine a semantic map with a stream processing framework for live analysis of the spatio-temporal relation of objects, based on the map and information inferred from sensors streams. To demonstrate the functionality of our concept, we implemented a proof-of-concept system to track everyday events in an office environment. The presented application scenario clearly demonstrates the benefits of the proposed architecture for detecting and handling complex spatio-temporal events.

This work in progress paper presents an automated approach for network coverage prediction in real-world environments by combining mobile mapping, 3D mesh generation, and a ray launching based network simulator. We identify the challenges and demonstrate the functionality of such a pipeline. We preview an empirical evaluation in a realistic real-world environment.

Being one of the fundamental problems in autonomous robotics, SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) algorithms have gained a lot of attention. Although numerous approaches have been presented for determining 6D poses in 3D environments, one of the main challenges that remains is the required combination of real-time processing and high energy efficiency. In this paper, a combination of CPU and FPGA processing is used to tackle this problem, utilizing a reconfigurable SoC. We present a complete solution for embedded LiDAR-based SLAM that uses a global Truncated Signed Distance Function (TSDF) as map representation. A hardware-in-the-loop environment with ROS integration enables efficient evaluation of new variants of algorithms and implementations. Based on benchmark data sets and real-world environments, we show that our approach compares well to established SLAM algorithms. Compared to a software implementation on a state-of-the-art PC, the proposed implementation achieves a 7-fold speed-up and requires 18 times less energy when using a Xilinx UltraScale+ XCZU15EG.

We present a highly efficient approach to compute continuous shortest path vector fields on arbitrarily shaped 3D triangular meshes for robot navigation in complex real-world outdoor environments. The continuity of the vector field allows to query the shortest distance, direction and geodesic path to the goal at any point within the mesh triangles, resulting in accurate paths. In order to avoid impassable areas, our wavefront propagation method runs on a modular extendable multilayer map architecture taking different geometric cost layers into account. We describe the mathematical foundation of the geodesic distances and continuous vector field computation and demonstrate the performance in real-world and multilevel environments on our campus with a tunnel, ramps and stair- cases, and in a difficult, steep forest area with a stone quarry. For reproducibility, we provide a ready-to-use ROS software stack as well as Gazebo simulations.

We present an approach to create a semantic map of an indoor environment, based on a series of 3D point clouds captured by a mobile robot using a Kinect camera. The proposed system reconstructs the surfaces in the point clouds, detects different types of furniture and estimates their poses. The result is a consistent mesh representation of the environment enriched by CAD models corresponding to the detected pieces of furniture. We evaluate our approach on two datasets totaling over 800 frames directly on each individual frame.

Textured polygon meshes are becoming more and more important for robotic applications. In this paper we present an approach to automatically extract textures from colored 3D point cloud data and apply them to a polygonal reconstruction of the scene. The extracted textures are analyzed for existing patters and reused if several instances appear. Emphasis of this work is on minimizing the number of used pixels while maintaining a realistic impression of the scanned environment.