arXiv subjects

Martin Magnusson

Publications and source records attributed to Martin Magnusson.

44 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

BFAR-Bounded False Alarm Rate detector for improved radar odometry estimation

This paper presents a new detector for filtering noise from true detections in radar data, which improves the state of the art in radar odometry. Scanning Frequency-Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radars can be useful for localization and mapping in low visibility, but return a lot of noise compared to (more commonly used) lidar, which makes the detection task more challenging. Our Bounded False-Alarm Rate (BFAR) detector is different from the classical Constant False-Alarm Rate (CFAR) detector in that it applies an affine transformation on the estimated noise level after which the parameters that minimize the estimation error can be learned. BFAR is an optimized combination between CFAR and fixed-level thresholding. Only a single parameter needs to be learned from a training dataset. We apply BFAR to the use case of radar odometry, and adapt a state-of-the-art odometry pipeline (CFEAR), replacing its original conservative filtering with BFAR. In this way we reduce the state-of-the-art translation/rotation odometry errors from 1.76%/0.5deg/100 m to 1.55%/0.46deg/100 m; an improvement of 12.5%.

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arXiv2021

CorAl -- Are the point clouds Correctly Aligned?

In robotics perception, numerous tasks rely on point cloud registration. However, currently there is no method that can automatically detect misaligned point clouds reliably and without environment-specific parameters. We propose "CorAl", an alignment quality measure and alignment classifier for point cloud pairs, which facilitates the ability to introspectively assess the performance of registration. CorAl compares the joint and the separate entropy of the two point clouds. The separate entropy provides a measure of the entropy that can be expected to be inherent to the environment. The joint entropy should therefore not be substantially higher if the point clouds are properly aligned. Computing the expected entropy makes the method sensitive also to small alignment errors, which are particularly hard to detect, and applicable in a range of different environments. We found that CorAl is able to detect small alignment errors in previously unseen environments with an accuracy of 95% and achieve a substantial improvement to previous methods.

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arXiv2021

CFEAR Radarodometry -- Conservative Filtering for Efficient and Accurate Radar Odometry

This paper presents the accurate, highly efficient, and learning-free method CFEAR Radarodometry for large-scale radar odometry estimation. By using a filtering technique that keeps the k strongest returns per azimuth and by additionally filtering the radar data in Cartesian space, we are able to compute a sparse set of oriented surface points for efficient and accurate scan matching. Registration is carried out by minimizing a point-to-line metric and robustness to outliers is achieved using a Huber loss. We were able to additionally reduce drift by jointly registering the latest scan to a history of keyframes and found that our odometry method generalizes to different sensor models and datasets without changing a single parameter. We evaluate our method in three widely different environments and demonstrate an improvement over spatially cross-validated state-of-the-art with an overall translation error of 1.76% in a public urban radar odometry benchmark, running at 55Hz merely on a single laptop CPU thread.

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arXiv2021

Robust Frequency-Based Structure Extraction

State of the art mapping algorithms can produce high-quality maps. However, they are still vulnerable to clutter and outliers which can affect map quality and in consequence hinder the performance of a robot, and further map processing for semantic understanding of the environment. This paper presents ROSE, a method for building-level structure detection in robotic maps. ROSE exploits the fact that indoor environments usually contain walls and straight-line elements along a limited set of orientations. Therefore metric maps often have a set of dominant directions. ROSE extracts these directions and uses this information to segment the map into structure and clutter through filtering the map in the frequency domain (an approach substantially underutilised in the mapping applications). Removing the clutter in this way makes wall detection (e.g. using the Hough transform) more robust. Our experiments demonstrate that (1) the application of ROSE for decluttering can substantially improve structural feature retrieval (e.g., walls) in cluttered environments, (2) ROSE can successfully distinguish between clutter and structure in the map even with substantial amount of noise and (3) ROSE can numerically assess the amount of structure in the map.

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arXiv2021

A method to segment maps from different modalities using free space layout -- MAORIS : MAp Of RIpples Segmentation

How to divide floor plans or navigation maps into semantic representations, such as rooms and corridors, is an important research question in fields such as human-robot interaction, place categorization, or semantic mapping. While most works focus on segmenting robot built maps, those are not the only types of map a robot, or its user, can use. We present a method for segmenting maps from different modalities, focusing on robot built maps and hand-drawn sketch maps, and show better results than state of the art for both types. Our method segments the map by doing a convolution between the distance image of the map and a circular kernel, and grouping pixels of the same value. Segmentation is done by detecting ripple-like patterns where pixel values varies quickly, and merging neighboring regions with similar values. We identify a flaw in the segmentation evaluation metric used in recent works and propose a metric based on Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC). We compare our results to ground-truth segmentations of maps from a publicly available dataset, on which we obtain a better MCC than the state of the art with 0.98 compared to 0.65 for a recent Voronoi-based segmentation method and 0.70 for the DuDe segmentation method. We also provide a dataset of sketches of an indoor environment, with two possible sets of ground truth segmentations, on which our method obtains an MCC of 0.56 against 0.28 for the Voronoi-based segmentation method and 0.30 for DuDe.

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arXiv2020

Localising Faster: Efficient and precise lidar-based robot localisation in large-scale environments

This paper proposes a novel approach for global localisation of mobile robots in large-scale environments. Our method leverages learning-based localisation and filtering-based localisation, to localise the robot efficiently and precisely through seeding Monte Carlo Localisation (MCL) with a deep-learned distribution. In particular, a fast localisation system rapidly estimates the 6-DOF pose through a deep-probabilistic model (Gaussian Process Regression with a deep kernel), then a precise recursive estimator refines the estimated robot pose according to the geometric alignment. More importantly, the Gaussian method (i.e. deep probabilistic localisation) and non-Gaussian method (i.e. MCL) can be integrated naturally via importance sampling. Consequently, the two systems can be integrated seamlessly and mutually benefit from each other. To verify the proposed framework, we provide a case study in large-scale localisation with a 3D lidar sensor. Our experiments on the Michigan NCLT long-term dataset show that the proposed method is able to localise the robot in 1.94 s on average (median of 0.8 s) with precision 0.75~m in a large-scale environment of approximately 0.5 km2.

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arXiv2020

SLAM auto-complete: completing a robot map using an emergency map

In search and rescue missions, time is an important factor; fast navigation and quickly acquiring situation awareness might be matters of life and death. Hence, the use of robots in such scenarios has been restricted by the time needed to explore and build a map. One way to speed up exploration and mapping is to reason about unknown parts of the environment using prior information. While previous research on using external priors for robot mapping mainly focused on accurate maps or aerial images, such data are not always possible to get, especially indoor. We focus on emergency maps as priors for robot mapping since they are easy to get and already extensively used by firemen in rescue missions. However, those maps can be outdated, information might be missing, and the scales of rooms are typically not consistent. We have developed a formulation of graph-based SLAM that incorporates information from an emergency map. The graph-SLAM is optimized using a combination of robust kernels, fusing the emergency map and the robot map into one map, even when faced with scale inaccuracies and inexact start poses. We typically have more than 50% of wrong correspondences in the settings studied in this paper, and the method we propose correctly handles them. Experiments in an office environment show that we can handle up to 70% of wrong correspondences and still get the expected result. The robot can navigate and explore while taking into account places it has not yet seen. We demonstrate this in a test scenario and also show that the emergency map is enhanced by adding information not represented such as closed doors or new walls.

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arXiv2018

2D Map Alignment With Region Decomposition

In many applications of autonomous mobile robots the following problem is encountered. Two maps of the same environment are available, one a prior map and the other a sensor map built by the robot. To benefit from all available information in both maps, the robot must find the correct alignment between the two maps. There exist many approaches to address this challenge, however, most of the previous methods rely on assumptions such as similar modalities of the maps, same scale, or existence of an initial guess for the alignment. In this work we propose a decomposition-based method for 2D spatial map alignment which does not rely on those assumptions. Our proposed method is validated and compared with other approaches, including generic data association approaches and map alignment algorithms. Real world examples of four different environments with thirty six sensor maps and four layout maps are used for this analysis. The maps, along with an implementation of the method, are made publicly available online.

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