Deliverable 2.3

Second vehicle platform available This deliverable documents the functionality of the second vehicle platform. It details the sensor setup, presents the high-level processing framework, reports on communication capabilities and provides a brief overview of the safety elements and policies. pdf

Modular Sensor Fusion for Semantic Segmentation

Hermann Blum, Abel Gawel, Roland Siegwart and Cesar Cadena IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2018 Sensor fusion is a fundamental process in robotic systems as it extends the perceptual range and increases robustness in real-world operations. Current multi-sensor deep learning based semantic segmentation approaches do not provide robustness to under-performing classes in one modality, or require a specific architecture with access to the full aligned multi-sensor training data. In this work, we analyze statistical fusion approaches for semantic segmentation that overcome these drawbacks while keeping a competitive performance. The studied approaches are modular by construction, allowing to have different...

Fusion Scheme for Semantic and Instance-level Segmentation

Arthur Daniel Costea, Andra Petrovai, Sergiu Nedevschi Proceedings of 2018 IEEE 21th International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC 2018), Maui, Hawaii, USA, 4-7 Nov. 2018, pp. 3469-3475 A powerful scene understanding can be achieved by combining the tasks of semantic segmentation and instance level recognition. Considering that these tasks are complementary, we propose a multi-objective fusion scheme which leverages the capabilities of each task: pixel level semantic segmentation performs well in background classification and delimiting foreground objects from background, while instance level segmentation excels in recognizing and classifying objects as a whole. We use a fully convolutional residual network...

Map Management for Efficient Long-Term Visual Localization in Outdoor Environments

Mathias Buerki, Marcyn Dymczyk, Igor Gilitschenski, Cesar Cadena, Roland Siegwart, and Juan Nieto IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV) 2018 We present a complete map management process for a visual localization system designed for multi-vehicle long-term operations in resource constrained outdoor environments. Outdoor visual localization generates large amounts of data that need to be incorporated into a lifelong visual map in order to allow localization at all times and under all appearance conditions. Processing these large quantities of data is nontrivial, as it is subject to limited computational and storage capabilities both on the vehicle and on the mapping back-end. We...

Design of an autonomous racecar: Perception, state estimation and system integration

Miguel Valls, Hubertus Hendrikx, Victor Reijgwart, Fabio Meier, Inkyu Sa, Renaud Dube, Abel Gawel, Mathias Bürki and Roland Siegwart IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2018 This paper introduces fluela driverless: the first autonomous racecar to win a Formula Student Driverless competition. In this competition, among other challenges, an autonomous racecar is tasked to complete 10 laps of a previously unknown racetrack as fast as possible and using only onboard sensing and computing. The key components of fluela’s design are its modular redundant sub–systems that allow robust performance despite challenging perceptual conditions or partial system failures. The paper...

maplab: An Open Framework for Research in Visual-inertial Mapping and Localization

Thomas Schneider, Marcin Dymczyk, Marius Fehr, Kevin Egger, Simon Lynen, Igor Gilitschenski and Roland Siegwart IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2018 Robust and accurate visual-inertial estimation is crucial to many of today’s challenges in robotics. Being able to localize against a prior map and obtain accurate and drift-free pose estimates can push the applicability of such systems even further. Most of the currently available solutions, however, either focus on a single session use-case, lack localization capabilities or an end-to-end pipeline. We believe that by combining state-of-the-art algorithms, scalable multi-session mapping tools, and a flexible user interface, we can create an...