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 [...]
Classic sensor systems for mobile robotic platforms depend primarily on vision and lidar sensors, incorporating the GPS and IMU for additional robustness. Although radar has been well studied for target detection over the past century, its role in mobile robotics has been limited. Radars have mostly served as warning sensors, alerting autonomous systems [...]
The extraction of geometric models has long been of interest to the robotics community. Many interesting applications such as homography,plane estimation and ego-motion estimation demand the ability to fit geometric models onto noisy data. Additionally, these geometric models are often drivers of other algorithms for algorithms navigation, perception and 3D reconstructions creating an increased [...]
ORI is expanding! I'm starting a new research group focused on estimation, search, and path planning. It's a continuation of my previous work developing and deploying theoretically well-founded robotic algorithms here and at the University of Toronto. As is the ORI way, we will be testing the work on a variety of real-world robotic applications. [...]
Let’s imagine a scenario where a robot, either walking on two or four legs or moving on wheels, is required to explore a cluttered environment containing corridors, constrictions, uneven terrains or staircases. The robot would process proprioceptive inertial and leg/wheel odometry measurements, as well as exteroceptive observations from a 3D laser scanner. The odometry estimate [...]
Programming by Demonstration for Shared Control with an Application in Teleoperation
This blog post provides an overview of our paper "Vote3Deep: Fast Object Detection in 3D Point Clouds Using Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks" by Martin Engelcke, Dushyant Rao, Dominic Zeng Wang, Chi Hay Tong, and Ingmar Posner which was published at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2017. For a quick overview you [...]