Ameya Salvi

Pardha Sai Krishna Ala, Ameya Salvi, Venkat Krovi et al.

Accurate state estimation requires careful consideration of uncertainty surrounding the process and measurement models; these characteristics are usually not well-known and need an experienced designer to select the covariance matrices. An error in the selection of covariance matrices could impact the accuracy of the estimation algorithm and may sometimes cause the filter to diverge. Identifying noise characteristics has long been a challenging problem due to uncertainty surrounding noise sources and difficulties in systematic noise modeling. Most existing approaches try identifying unknown covariance matrices through an optimization algorithm involving innovation sequences. In recent years, learning approaches have been utilized to determine the stochastic characteristics of process and measurement models. We present a learning-based methodology with different loss functions to identify noise characteristics and test these approaches' performance for real-time vehicle state estimation

Ameya Salvi, Venkat Krovi

Vision-based lane keeping is a topic of significant interest in the robotics and autonomous ground vehicles communities in various on-road and off-road applications. The skid-steered vehicle architecture has served as a useful vehicle platform for human controlled operations. However, systematic modeling, especially of the skid-slip wheel terrain interactions (primarily in off-road settings) has created bottlenecks for automation deployment. End-to-end learning based methods such as imitation learning and deep reinforcement learning, have gained prominence as a viable deployment option to counter the lack of accurate analytical models. However, the systematic formulation and subsequent verification/validation in dynamic operation regimes (particularly for skid-steered vehicles) remains a work in progress. To this end, a novel approach for structured formulation for learning visual navigation is proposed and investigated in this work. Extensive software simulations, hardware evaluations and ablation studies now highlight the significantly improved performance of the proposed approach against contemporary literature.