30 accepted papers
Accurate odometry is a critical component in a robotic navigation stack, and subsequent modules such as planning and control often rely on an estimate of the robot’s motion. LiDAR-based odometry approaches should be robust across sensor types and deployable in different target domains, from solid-st
Accurate localization is crucial for the autonomous operation of mobile robots. Specifically for indoor scenarios, localization algorithms typically rely on a previously generated map. However, many real-world sites like warehouses or healthcare environments violate the underlying assumption that th
Forests are vital to our ecosystems, acting as carbon sinks, climate stabilizers, biodiversity centers, and wood sources. Due to their scale, monitoring and managing forests takes a lot of work. Forestry robotics offers the potential for enabling efficient and sustainable foresting practices through
Robust and accurate localization and mapping of an environment using laser scanners, so-called LiDAR SLAM, is essential to many robotic applications. Early 3D LiDAR SLAM methods often exploited additional information from IMU or GNSS sensors to enhance localization accuracy and mitigate drift. Later
Automatic fruit growth monitoring plays a vital role in advancing precision agriculture. Tracking the evolution of fruits over time is essential to monitor their development and optimize production. The ability to recognize fruits over periods of time, even with drastic scene changes, is a required
The ability to detect loop closures plays an essential role in any SLAM system. Loop closures allow correcting the drifting pose estimates from a sensor odometry pipeline. In this paper, we address the problem of effectively detecting loop closures in LiDAR SLAM systems in various environments with…
Odometry estimation is crucial for every autonomous system requiring navigation in an unknown environment. In modern mobile robots, 3D LiDAR-inertial systems are often used for this task. By fusing LiDAR scans and IMU measurements, these systems can reduce the accumulated drift caused by sequentiall…
Tracking changes in growing plants is important for automating phenotyping and robots managing crops. In this paper, we propose a system that uses a 3D model of plants along crop rows to enable a robotic platform to localize itself even in the presence of heavy changes and deforming the model to ada…
Forests play a crucial role in our ecosystems, functioning as carbon sinks, climate stabilizers, biodiversity hubs, and sources of wood. By the very nature of their scale, monitoring and maintaining forests is a challenging task. Robotics in forestry can have the potential for substantial automation…
Mobile robots that navigate in unknown environments need to be constantly aware of the dynamic objects in their surroundings for mapping, localization, and planning. It is key to reason about moving objects in the current observation and at the same time to also update the internal model of the stat
Our world is non-static, and robots should be able to track its changing geometry. For tracking changes, data asso-ciations between 3D points over time are key. In this paper, we investigate the problem of associating 3D points on plant organs from different mapping runs over time while the plants g…
Monitoring the traits of plants and fruits is a fundamental task in horticulture. With accurate measurements, farmers can predict the yield of their crops and use this information for making informed management decisions, and breeders can use it for variety selection. Agricultural robotic applicatio…
Factor graphs are graphical models used to represent a wide variety of problems across robotics, such as Structure from Motion (SfM), Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) and calibration. Typically, at their core, they have an optimization problem whose terms only depend on a small subset of
Plant phenotyping is a central task in agriculture, as it describes plants' growth stage, development, and other relevant quantities. Robots can help automate this process by accurately estimating plant traits such as the number of leaves, leaf area, and the plant size. In this paper, we address the…
Determining the state of a mobile robot is an essential building block of robot navigation systems. In this letter, we address the problem of estimating the robot's pose in an indoor environment using 2D LiDAR data and investigate how modern environment models can improve gold standard Monte-Carlo l
Robust and accurate pose estimation of a robotic platform, so-called sensor-based odometry, is an essential part of many robotic applications. While many sensor odometry systems made progress by adding more complexity to the ego-motion estimation process, we move in the opposite direction. By removi
Mapping an environment is essential for several robotic tasks, particularly for localization. In this letter, we address the problem of mapping the environment using LiDAR point clouds with the goal to obtain a map representation that is well suited for robot localization. To this end, we utilize a
Lifelong localization in a given map is an essential capability for autonomous service robots. In this letter, we consider the task of long-term localization in a changing indoor environment given sparse CAD floor plans. The commonly used pre-built maps from the robot sensors may increase the cost a
Agricultural robots have the prospect to enable more efficient and sustainable agricultural production of food, feed, and fiber. Perception of crops and weeds is a central component of agricultural robots that aim to monitor fields and assess the plants as well as their growth stage in an automatic…
Perception is crucial for robots that act in real-world environments, as autonomous systems need to see and understand the world around them to act properly. Panoptic segmentation provides an interpretation of the scene by computing a pixelwise semantic label together with instance IDs. In this pape…
Crop inspection is a critical part of modern agricultural practices that helps farmers assess the current status of a field and then make crop management decisions. Current crop inspection methods are labour-intensive tasks, which makes them rather slow and expensive to apply. In this paper, we expl…
Crops for food, feed, fiber, and fuel are key natural resources for our society. Monitoring plants and measuring their traits is an important task in agriculture often referred to as plant phenotyping. Traditionally, this task is done manually, which is time- and labor-intensive. Robots can automate
Reliable and accurate registration of point clouds is a challenging problem in robotics as well as in the domain of autonomous driving. In this article, we address the task of aligning point clouds with low overlap, containing moving objects, and without prior information about the initial guess. We
Ego-motion estimation is a fundamental building block of any autonomous system that needs to navigate in an environment. In large-scale outdoor scenes, 3D LiDARs are often used for this task, as they provide a large number of range measurements at high precision. In this paper, we propose a novel ap
Pose graph optimization is a non-convex optimization problem encountered in many areas of robotics perception. Its convergence to an accurate solution is conditioned by two factors: the non-linearity of the cost function in use and the initial configuration of the pose variables. In this letter, we
Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) systems are fundamental building blocks for any autonomous robot navigating in unknown environments. The SLAM implementation heavily depends on the sensor modality employed on the mobile platform. For this reason, assumptions on the scene's structure are…
Robust localization in a given map is a crucial component of most autonomous robots. In this paper, we address the problem of localizing in an indoor environment that changes and where prominent structures have no correspondence in the map built at a different point in time. To overcome the discrepa…
Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) is considered a mature research field with numerous applications and publicly available open-source systems. Despite this maturity, existing SLAM systems often rely on ad-hoc implementations or are tailored to predefined sensor setups. In this work, we ta…
In this paper, we present a sonar-based navigation system, designed to deploy a fleet of autonomous mobile platforms at a reasonable cost. In educational and hobbyist contexts, a large number of robots is required. By means of classical navigation approaches, every robot should be provided with accu…