Seminar Robot Navigation (Freiburg, Winter 2007/2008)

A key component of any autonomous mobile robot is its navigation system. It allows the robot to move in a goal-oriented way through its environment. In order to do so, the robot must obtain a suitable description of the environment, like a metric or topological map. It must also estimate its own position in such a map. Path planning is used to determine a sequence of motions towards a goal. While the robot traverses the planned path it has to avoid collisions with obstacles. The seminar covers recent papers related to robot navigation.

Requirements and Information

• Organizers: Prof. Dr. Wolfram Burgard, Dr. Sven Behnke, and Dr. Maren Bennewitz
• The seminar is restricted to 12 participants. 
• You have to prepare a talk of approx. 30 minutes and to write a summary.
  Both can be done in English or German. Including discussion your slot will be 45 minutes.
  
• The seminar will held as a Blockseminar on Febuary 18th/19th 2008, directly after the end of the semester.
• The seminar will take place in room 106.00.007.
• The slides for the presentation must be shown to the supervisor before Friday, 1.2.2008, 6 p.m.
• The summaries should be approx. 10 pages long. Much longer summaries will not be accepted.
  The summaries must be submitted by February 29th, 2008.

Schedule

Monday, Feb. 18th

• Anytime Path Planning and Replanning in Dynamic Environments 
  Vortragender: Kamal Al-Bawani, Betreuer: Axel Rottmann  
  • J. van den Berg, D. Ferguson, and J. Kuffner:
    Anytime Path Planning and Replanning in Dynamic Environments
    ICRA 2006
    
• 3D Path Planning and Replanning
  Vortragender: Muhammad Awais, Betreuer: Daniel Meyer-Delius 
  • J. Carsten, D. Ferguson, A. Stentz:
    3D Field D*: Improved Path Planning and Replanning in Three Dimensions
    IROS 2006
    
• Spline-based Robot Navigation 
  Vortragender: Armin Hornung, Betreuer: Boris Lau
  • Magid, E.; Keren, D.; Rivlin, and E. Yavneh:
    Spline-Based Robot Navigation
    IROS 2006
    
• E* Path Planner
  Vortragender: Norman Kohler, Betreuer: Boris Lau
  • R. Philippsen:
    A Light Formulation of the E* Interpolated Path Replanner
    Techreport EPFL 2006
    
• Feature-based Scan Matching
  Vortragender: Kefei Chen, Betreuer: Daniel Meyer-Delius
  • F. Ramos, D. Fox, H. Durrant-Whyte:
    CRF-Matching: Conditional Random Fields for Feature-Based Scan Matching
    RSS 2007

Tuesday, Feb. 19th

• Outdoor Localization
  Vortragender: Jakob Ziegler, Betreuer: Axel Rottmann
  • Jesse Levinson, Michael Montemerlo, and Sebastian Thrun:
    Map-Based Precision Vehicle Localization in Urban Environments
    In Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), Atlanta, June 2007.
    
• Gaussian Processes for Signal Strength-Based Location Estimation
  Vortragender: Johannes Wendeberg, Betreuerin: Maren Bennewitz
  • Brian Ferris, Dirk Haehnel, Dieter Fox
    Gaussian Processes for Signal Strength-Based Location Estimation.
    In Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems Conference (RSS), Philadelphia, 2006.
    
• Orthogonal SLAM
  Vortragender: Nathan Franklin, Betreuer: Sven Behnke
  • Viet Nguyen, Ahad Harati, Nicola Tomatis,  Agostino Martinelli, and Roland Siegwart:
    Orthogonal SLAM: a Step toward Lightweight Indoor Autonomous Navigation.
    In Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ Intenational Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Beijing, China, 2006.
  • Viet Nguyen, Ahad Harati, and Roland Siegwart:
    A Lightweight SLAM Algorithm using Orthogonal Planes for Indoor Mobile Robotics.
    In Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ Intenational Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Dan Diego, CA, 2007.
    
• Discriminative Particle Filters 
  Vortragender: Hannes Schulz, Betreuer: Sven Behnke 
  • Benson Limketkai, Dieter Fox, and Lin Liaot:
    CRF-Filters: Discriminative Particle Filters for Sequential State Estimation.
    In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Roma, Italy, April 2007.
    
• Dimensionality Reduction for Learning Omnidirectional Legged Motion
  Vortragender: Gerald Lippert
  • J. Zico Kolter and Andrew Ng:
    Learning omnidirectional path following using dimensionality reduction.
    In Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems, Atlanta, June 2007.