11 accepted papers
This paper presents a reactive navigation method that leverages a Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) control enhanced with spline interpolation for the control input sequence and Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD). The MPPI framework addresses a nonlinear optimization problem by determinin…
This paper presents a novel Stochastic Optimal Control (SOC) method based on Model Predictive Path Integral control (MPPI), named Stein Variational Guided MPPI (SVG-MPPI), designed to handle rapidly shifting multimodal optimal action distributions. While MPPI can find a Gaussian-approximated optimal…
This paper presents a simultaneous localization and map-assisted environment recognition (SLAMER) method. Mobile robots usually have an environment map and environment information can be assigned to the map. Important information such as no entry zone can be predicted from the map if localization ha…
This letter presents a mobile robot localization method that uses depth regression from camera images. In this work, we use convolutional neural networks to regress the depth from the camera images. However, the depth regression results contain uncertainty, which must be resolved to stably perform l
This paper proposes a hybrid localization method that fuses Monte Carlo localization (MCL) and convolutional neural network (CNN)-based end-to-end (E2E) localization. MCL is based on particle filter and requires proposal distributions to sample the particles. The proposal distribution is generally p…
Semantics can be leveraged in ego-vehicle localization to improve robustness and accuracy because objects with the same labels can be correctly matched with each other. Object recognition has significantly improved owing to advances in machine learning algorithms. However, perfect object recognition
Recognizing misalignment between sensor measurements and objects that exist on a map due to inaccuracies in localization estimation is challenging. This can be attributed to the fact that the sensor measurements are individually modeled for solving the localization problem, resulting in entire relat
Localization robustness against environment dynamics is significant for robots to achieve autonomous navigation in unmodified environments. A basic method of improving the robustness of a robot is considering the sensor observations obtained from mapped obstacles and using them for localizing the ro…
In this paper we present a data driven approach for safe and smooth autonomous navigation of a personal mobility vehicle (PMV) when facing moving obstacles such as people and bicycles in public pedestrian paths. In a period of three months, data from five different persons driving the robotic PMV in…
This paper presents a model for safe driving at blind intersections and its integration to a local planner based on a Frenet frame. The model predicts potential moving obstacles from blind intersections to proactively slow down to avoid potential collisions. The derivation of the model is described…
The magnetic field that exists in an indoor environment includes rich magnetic fluctuations because buildings contain many magnetized materials (e.g., steel frames). These fluctuations can be used as landmarks, the use of which requires the creation of a magnetic map representing the distribution of…