Emanuele Palazzolo

Emanuele Palazzolo, Jens Behley, Philipp Lottes et al.

Mapping and localization are essential capabilities of robotic systems. Although the majority of mapping systems focus on static environments, the deployment in real-world situations requires them to handle dynamic objects. In this paper, we propose an approach for an RGB-D sensor that is able to consistently map scenes containing multiple dynamic elements. For localization and mapping, we employ an efficient direct tracking on the truncated signed distance function (TSDF) and leverage color information encoded in the TSDF to estimate the pose of the sensor. The TSDF is efficiently represented using voxel hashing, with most computations parallelized on a GPU. For detecting dynamics, we exploit the residuals obtained after an initial registration, together with the explicit modeling of free space in the model. We evaluate our approach on existing datasets, and provide a new dataset showing highly dynamic scenes. These experiments show that our approach often surpass other state-of-the-art dense SLAM methods. We make available our dataset with the ground truth for both the trajectory of the RGB-D sensor obtained by a motion capture system and the model of the static environment using a high-precision terrestrial laser scanner. Finally, we release our approach as open source code.

F. Langer, L. Mandtler, A. Milioto et al.

High efficiency in precision farming depends on accurate tools to perform weed detection and mapping of crops. This allows for precise removal of harmful weeds with a lower amount of pesticides, as well as increase of the harvest's yield by providing the farmer with valuable information. In this paper, we address the problem of fully automatic stem detection from image data for this purpose. Our approach runs on mobile agricultural robots taking RGB images. After processing the images to obtain a vegetation mask, our approach separates each plant into its individual leaves and later estimates a precise stem position. This allows an upstream mapping algorithm to add the high-resolution stem positions as a semantic aggregate to the global map of the robot, which can be used for weeding and for analyzing crop statistics. We implemented our approach and thoroughly tested it on three different datasets with vegetation masks and stem position ground truth. The experiments presented in this paper conclude that our module is able to detect leaves and estimate the stem's position at a rate of 56 Hz on a single CPU. We furthermore provide the software to the community.