THÖR: Human-Robot Indoor Navigation Experiment and Accurate Motion Trajectories Dataset

Understanding human behavior is key for robots and intelligent systems that share a space with people. Accordingly, research that enables such systems to perceive, track, learn and predict human behavior as well as to plan and interact with humans has received increasing attention over the last years. The availability of large human motion datasets that contain relevant levels of difficulty is fundamental to this research. Existing datasets are often limited in terms of information content, annotation quality or variability of human behavior. In this paper, we present TH\"OR, a new dataset with human motion trajectory and eye gaze data collected in an indoor environment with accurate ground truth for position, head orientation, gaze direction, social grouping, obstacles map and goal coordinates. TH\"OR also contains sensor data collected by a 3D lidar and involves a mobile robot navigating the space. We propose a set of metrics to quantitatively analyze motion trajectory datasets such as the average tracking duration, ground truth noise, curvature and speed variation of the trajectories. In comparison to prior art, our dataset has a larger variety in human motion behavior, is less noisy, and contains annotations at higher frequencies.

Object-RPE: Dense 3D Reconstruction and Pose Estimation with Convolutional Neural Networks for Warehouse Robots

We present a system for accurate 3D instance-aware semantic reconstruction and 6D pose estimation, using an RGB-D camera. Our framework couples convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and a state-of-the-art dense Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM) system, ElasticFusion, to achieve both high-quality semantic reconstruction as well as robust 6D pose estimation for relevant objects. The method presented in this paper extends a high-quality instance-aware semantic 3D Mapping system from previous work [1] by adding a 6D object pose estimator. While the main trend in CNN-based 6D pose estimation has been to infer object's position and orientation from single views of the scene, our approach explores performing pose estimation from multiple viewpoints, under the conjecture that combining multiple predictions can improve the robustness of an object detection system. The resulting system is capable of producing high-quality object-aware semantic reconstructions of room-sized environments, as well as accurately detecting objects and their 6D poses. The developed method has been verified through experimental validation on the YCB-Video dataset and a newly collected warehouse object dataset. Experimental results confirmed that the proposed system achieves improvements over state-of-the-art methods in terms of surface reconstruction and object pose prediction. Our code and video are available at https://sites.google.com/view/object-rpe.

Current Trends in the Use of Eye Tracking in Mathematics Education Research: A PME Survey

Eye tracking (ET) is a research method that receives growing interest in mathematics education research (MER). This paper aims to give a literature overview, specifically focusing on the evolution of interest in this technology, ET equipment, and analysis methods used in mathematics education. To capture the current state, we focus on papers published in the proceedings of PME, one of the primary conferences dedicated to MER, of the last ten years. We identify trends in interest, methodology, and methods of analysis that are used in the community, and discuss possible future developments.

Current Trends in Eye Tracking Research in Mathematics Education: A PME Literature Review

Eye tracking (ET) is a research method that receives growing interest in mathematics education research (MER). This paper aims to give a literature overview, specifically focusing on the evolution of interest in this technology, ET equipment, and analysis methods used in mathematics education. To capture the current state, we focus on papers published in the proceedings of PME, one of the primary conferences dedicated to MER, of the last ten years. We identify trends in interest, methodology, and methods of analysis that are used in the community, and discuss possible future developments.

High-quality Instance-aware Semantic 3D Map Using RGB-D Camera

We present a mapping system capable of constructing detailed instance-level semantic models of room-sized indoor environments by means of an RGB-D camera. In this work, we integrate deep-learning based instance segmentation and classification into a state of the art RGB-D SLAM system. We leverage the pipeline of ElasticFusion \cite{whelan2016elasticfusion} as a backbone, and propose modifications of the registration cost function to make full use of the instance class labels in the process. The proposed objective function features tunable weights for the depth, appearance, and semantic information channels, which can be learned from data. The resulting system is capable of producing accurate semantic maps of room-sized environments, as well as reconstructing highly detailed object-level models. The developed method has been verified through experimental validation on the TUM RGB-D SLAM benchmark and the YCB video dataset. Our results confirmed that the proposed system performs favorably in terms of trajectory estimation, surface reconstruction, and segmentation quality in comparison to other state-of-the-art systems.

A Next-Best-Smell Approach for Remote Gas Detection with a Mobile Robot

The problem of gas detection is relevant to many real-world applications, such as leak detection in industrial settings and landfill monitoring. Using mobile robots for gas detection has several advantages and can reduce danger for humans. In our work, we address the problem of planning a path for a mobile robotic platform equipped with a remote gas sensor, which minimizes the time to detect all gas sources in a given environment. We cast this problem as a coverage planning problem by defining a basic sensing operation -- a scan with the remote gas sensor -- as the field of "view" of the sensor. Given the computing effort required by previously proposed offline approaches, in this paper we suggest a online coverage algorithm, called Next-Best-Smell, adapted from the Next-Best-View class of exploration algorithms. Our algorithm evaluates candidate locations with a global utility function, which combines utility values for travel distance, information gain, and sensing time, using Multi-Criteria Decision Making. In our experiments, conducted both in simulation and with a real robot, we found the performance of the Next-Best-Smell approach to be comparable with that of the state-of-the-art offline algorithm, at much lower computational cost.

SLAM auto-complete: completing a robot map using an emergency map

In search and rescue missions, time is an important factor; fast navigation and quickly acquiring situation awareness might be matters of life and death. Hence, the use of robots in such scenarios has been restricted by the time needed to explore and build a map. One way to speed up exploration and mapping is to reason about unknown parts of the environment using prior information. While previous research on using external priors for robot mapping mainly focused on accurate maps or aerial images, such data are not always possible to get, especially indoor. We focus on emergency maps as priors for robot mapping since they are easy to get and already extensively used by firemen in rescue missions. However, those maps can be outdated, information might be missing, and the scales of rooms are typically not consistent. We have developed a formulation of graph-based SLAM that incorporates information from an emergency map. The graph-SLAM is optimized using a combination of robust kernels, fusing the emergency map and the robot map into one map, even when faced with scale inaccuracies and inexact start poses. We typically have more than 50% of wrong correspondences in the settings studied in this paper, and the method we propose correctly handles them. Experiments in an office environment show that we can handle up to 70% of wrong correspondences and still get the expected result. The robot can navigate and explore while taking into account places it has not yet seen. We demonstrate this in a test scenario and also show that the emergency map is enhanced by adding information not represented such as closed doors or new walls.

Exploring home robot capabilities by medium fidelity prototyping

In order for autonomous robots to be able to support people's well-being in homes and everyday environments, new interactive capabilities will be required, as exemplified by the soft design used for Disney's recent robot character Baymax in popular fiction. Home robots will be required to be easy to interact with and intelligent--adaptive, fun, unobtrusive and involving little effort to power and maintain--and capable of carrying out useful tasks both on an everyday level and during emergencies. The current article adopts an exploratory medium fidelity prototyping approach for testing some new robotic capabilities in regard to recognizing people's activities and intentions and behaving in a way which is transparent to people. Results are discussed with the aim of informing next designs.

A method to segment maps from different modalities using free space layout - MAORIS : MAp Of RIpples Segmentation

How to divide floor plans or navigation maps into a semantic representation, such as rooms and corridors, is an important research question in fields such as human-robot interaction, place categorization, or semantic mapping. While most algorithms focus on segmenting robot built maps, those are not the only types of map a robot, or its user, can use. We have developed a method for segmenting maps from different modalities, focusing on robot built maps and hand-drawn sketch maps, and show better results than state of the art for both types. Our method segments the map by doing a convolution between the distance image of the map and a circular kernel, and grouping pixels of the same value. Segmentation is done by detecting ripple like patterns where pixel values vary quickly, and merging neighboring regions with similar values. We identify a flaw in segmentation evaluation metric used in recent works and propose a more consistent metric. We compare our results to ground-truth segmentations of maps from a publicly available dataset, on which we obtain a better Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) than state of the art with 0.98 compared to 0.85 for a recent Voronoi-based segmentation method and 0.78 for the DuDe segmentation method. We also provide a dataset of sketches of an indoor environment, with two possible sets of ground truth segmentations, on which our method obtains a MCC of 0.82 against 0.40 for the Voronoi-based segmentation method and 0.45 for DuDe.

An Eigenshapes Approach to Compressed Signed Distance Fields and Their Utility in Robot Mapping

In order to deal with the scaling problem of volumetric map representations we propose spatially local methods for high-ratio compression of 3D maps, represented as truncated signed distance fields. We show that these compressed maps can be used as meaningful descriptors for selective decompression in scenarios relevant to robotic applications. As compression methods, we compare using PCA-derived low-dimensional bases to non-linear auto-encoder networks and novel mixed architectures that combine both. Selecting two application-oriented performance metrics, we evaluate the impact of different compression rates on reconstruction fidelity as well as to the task of map-aided ego-motion estimation. It is demonstrated that lossily compressed distance fields used as cost functions for ego-motion estimation, can outperform their uncompressed counterparts in challenging scenarios from standard RGB-D data-sets.