How do we know when we don’t know? This is an important question to answer in any situation where we need to navigate through our surroundings, and something any autonomous mobile robot needs to know too. We discuss this introspection capability and its importance to our radar-based navigation algorithms [...]
Fast Radar Motion Estimation This blog post provides an overview of our paper “Fast Radar Motion Estimation with a Learnt Focus of Attention using Weak Supervision” by Roberto Aldera, Daniele De Martini, Matthew Gadd, and Paul Newman which was recently accepted for publication at the IEEE International Conference on [...]
Over the past few months, one of our 2nd year DPhil students, Mark Finean, has been volunteering as a robotics mentor to a group of girls pursuing their A levels at St Paul’s Girls’ School (SPGS) in London. For a school project, they wished to learn more about robots and investigate how they could [...]
TLDR: Physical intuition is a human super-power. It enables our superior object manipulation skills which we apply in countless scenarios - from playing with toys to using tools. The ShapeStacks project aims to equip robots with a similar intuition by providing a virtual playground in which robots can acquire [...]
What's the problem? Motivation This is a blog post designed for non-technical people to understand the basics of localization. As such we are not going to touch any code but rather interactively present you with examples how these systems run and what makes them tick. Localization is an essential [...]
Radar is awesome. When most people think of radar, they imagine a line sweeping around an old CRT display with its characteristic green hue - interrupted by approaching aircraft, or perhaps distant ships over the horizon. While our experience with cameras and GPS has remained up-to-date as hardware has [...]
Consider an office robot that must execute a range of tasks such as guiding visitors to offices; checking whether fire exits are clear; carrying and delivering items as requested by office users; and making announcements (“staff meeting in 10 minutes!”). A crucial requirement for such a robot [...]
Just as we use our eyes to perceive and navigate the world, many autonomous vehicles and systems rely on cameras to observe their environment. As we move through the world, we can watch as the world seems to move past us. We’ve long understood how to accurately estimate this [...]
This blog post provides an overview of our paper “Inferring Road Boundaries Through and Despite Traffic” by Tarlan Suleymanov, Paul Amayo and Paul Newman, which has been accepted for publication at the 21st IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC) 2018. In the context of autonomous driving, road [...]
For the last couple of years we have heard many companies and CEOs promising us fully autonomous cars in 2018 - 2020 [1, 2, 3, 4]. We are halfway through 2018 and, although they are definitely making progress, I do not see fully autonomous cars operating on a large scale [...]