17 accepted papers
Curb following is a critical technology for autonomous road sweeping vehicles. However, existing solutions face two primary challenges: unreliable curb detection and inefficient motion generation. Unreliable curb detection stems from the wide variability in curb dimensions and types, as well as inte…
Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is crucial for autonomous vehicles, as it enables their identification of previously visited locations. Compared with conventional single-frame retrieval, leveraging sequences of frames to depict places has been proven effective in alleviating perceptual aliasing. Howe
Accurate Six Degrees of Freedom (6-DoF) pose estimation of Ship-To-Shore (STS) quay crane spreaders is crucial for ensuring safe and efficient container handling in port automation. However, existing pose estimation techniques face significant challenges, as camera-based systems either rely on marke
Accurate Relative Pose Estimation (RPE) is critical for effective collaboration of multi-robot systems. Traditional methods using cameras or LiDARs heavily rely on overlapping Fields of View (FoV) between robots, which is highly demanding in practical applications and may hinder collaboration effici
As a new sensor, 4D radar (x, y, z, velocity) has great potential for V2X, due to its 3D point cloud, direct doppler velocity output, long distance ranging, low-cost, and more importantly, robust perception in all weathers. However, the extrinsic calibration of multiple long baseline 4D radars is ra…
Place Recognition is crucial for unmanned vehicles in terms of localization and mapping. Recent years have witnessed numerous explorations in the field where 2D cameras and 3D LiDARs are mostly employed. Despite their admirable performance they may encounter challenges in adverse weather such as rai…
LiDAR-based SLAM may easily fail in adverse weathers (e.g., rain, snow, smoke, fog), while mmWave Radar remains unaffected. However, current researches are primarily focused on 2D (x,y)(x,y) or 3D (x, yx, y, doppler) Radar and 3D LiDAR, while limited work can be found for 4D Radar (x, y, zx, y, z, d…
Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is essential for autonomous robots and unmanned vehicles, as an accurate identification of visited places can trigger a loop closure to optimize the built map. The most prevalent methods tackle VPR as a single-frame retrieval task, which uses a CNN-based encoder to des…
Robust visual place recognition (VPR) against significant appearance changes is crucial for the life-long operation of mobile robots. Focusing on this task, we propose a Co-Attentive Hierarchical Image Representations (CAHIR) framework for VPR, which unifies attention-sharing global and local descri…
In V2X (Vehicle-to-Everything), one important work is to extrinsically calibrate multiple 3D LiDARs, which are mounted with a long baseline and large viewpoint-difference at the road-side. Current solutions either require a specific target being set up (e.g., a sphere), or require specific features…
Multi-LiDAR system is an important part of V2X (Vehicle to Everything) to enhance the perception information for unmanned vehicles. To fuse the information from multiple 3D LiDARs, accurate extrinsic calibration between the LiDARs is essential. However, the existing multi-LiDAR calibration methods m…
Visual Place Recognition (VPR) has become an indispensable capacity for mobile robots to operate in large-scale environments. Existing methods in this field mostly focus on exploring high-performance encoding strategies, while few attempts are devoted to lightweight models that balance per-formance…
Place recognition is seen as a crucial factor to correct cumulative errors in Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) applications. Most existing studies focus on visual place recognition, which is inherently sensitive to environmental changes such as illumination, weather and seasons. Consider…
The core of visual place recognition (VPR) lies in how to identify task-relevant visual cues and embed them into discriminative representations. Focusing on these two points, we propose a novel encoding strategy named Attentional Pyramid Pooling of Salient Visual Residuals (APPSVR). It incorporates…
Symmetric environment is one of the most intractable and challenging scenarios for mobile robots to accomplish global localization tasks, due to the highly similar geometrical structures and insufficient distinctive features. Existing localization solutions in such scenarios either depend on pre-dep…
Large-scale visual place recognition (VPR) is inherently challenging because not all visual cues in the image are beneficial to the task. In order to highlight the task-relevant visual cues in the feature embedding, the existing attention mechanisms are either based on artificial rules or trained in…
Deep neural networks have achieved state-of-the-art performance in a wide range of recognition/classification tasks. However, when applying deep learning to real-world applications, there are still multiple challenges. A typical challenge is that unknown samples may be fed into the system during the…