Sagar Manglani

Sagar Manglani

This paper presents a study on the development of an obstacle-avoidance navigation system for autonomous navigation in home environments. The system utilizes vision-based techniques and advanced path-planning algorithms to enable the robot to navigate toward the destination while avoiding obstacles. The performance of the system is evaluated through qualitative and quantitative metrics, highlighting its strengths and limitations. The findings contribute to the advancement of indoor robot navigation, showcasing the potential of vision-based techniques for real-time, autonomous navigation.

Mokshith Voodarla, Shubham Shrivastava, Sagar Manglani et al.

We describe a light-weight, weather and lighting invariant, Semantic Bird's Eye View (S-BEV) signature for vision-based vehicle re-localization. A topological map of S-BEV signatures is created during the first traversal of the route, which are used for coarse localization in subsequent route traversal. A fine-grained localizer is then trained to output the global 3-DoF pose of the vehicle using its S-BEV and its coarse localization. We conduct experiments on vKITTI2 virtual dataset and show the potential of the S-BEV to be robust to weather and lighting. We also demonstrate results with 2 vehicles on a 22 km long highway route in the Ford AV dataset.

Nikita Jaipuria, Xianling Zhang, Rohan Bhasin et al.

Deep Learning has seen an unprecedented increase in vision applications since the publication of large-scale object recognition datasets and introduction of scalable compute hardware. State-of-the-art methods for most vision tasks for Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) rely on supervised learning and often fail to generalize to domain shifts and/or outliers. Dataset diversity is thus key to successful real-world deployment. No matter how big the size of the dataset, capturing long tails of the distribution pertaining to task-specific environmental factors is impractical. The goal of this paper is to investigate the use of targeted synthetic data augmentation - combining the benefits of gaming engine simulations and sim2real style transfer techniques - for filling gaps in real datasets for vision tasks. Empirical studies on three different computer vision tasks of practical use to AVs - parking slot detection, lane detection and monocular depth estimation - consistently show that having synthetic data in the training mix provides a significant boost in cross-dataset generalization performance as compared to training on real data only, for the same size of the training set.