9 accepted papers
In robotics and mapping, prior knowledge of an environment can be included as virtual assets to a simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) solution. Borrowing the concept of affordances from robotic manipulation (i.e. virtual/interactive object models/primitives), this work addresses the fundame
This paper presents a novel non-Gaussian inference algorithm, Normalizing Flow iSAM (NF-iSAM), for solving SLAM problems with non-Gaussian factors and/or non-linear measurement models. NF-iSAM exploits the expressive power of neural networks, and trains normalizing flows to draw samples from the joi…
This paper presents a method for processing sparse, non-Gaussian multimodal data in a simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) framework using factor graphs. Our approach demonstrates the feasibility of using a sum-product inference strategy to recover functional belief marginals from highly non…
Typically, the reconstruction problem is addressed in three independent steps: first, sensor processing techniques are used to filter and segment sensor data as required by the front end. Second, the front end builds the factor graph for the problem to obtain an accurate estimate of the robot’s full…
The recent success of object detection systems motivates object-based representations for robot navigation; i.e. semantic simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). The semantic SLAM problem can be decomposed into a discrete inference problem: determining object class labels and measurement-landm…
Synthetic Aperture Sonar (SAS) is a technique to improve the spatial resolution from a moving set of receivers by extending the array in time, increasing the effective array length and aperture. This technique is limited by the accuracy of the receiver position estimates, necessitating highly accura…
We extend the core operation of non-parametric belief propagation (NBP), also known as multi-scale sequential Gibbs sampling, to approximate products of kernel density estimated beliefs that reside on some manifold. The original algorithm, though multidimensional, implicitly assumes the beliefs to r…
Robotic systems typically require memory recall mechanisms for a variety of tasks including localization, mapping, planning, visualization etc. We argue for a novel memory recall framework that enables more complex inference schemas by separating the computation from its associated data. In this wor…
We relax parametric inference to a nonparametric representation towards more general solutions on factor graphs. We use the Bayes tree factorization to maximally exploit structure in the joint posterior thereby minimizing computation. We use kernel density estimation to represent a wider class of co…