Seminar  Robot Navigation (Freiburg, Winter 2006/2007)

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 and Dr. Sven Behnke
• 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 orgainzers will provide a Windows XP notebook with PowerPoint and Acrobat Reader if you do not want to use your own notebook.
• The seminar will held as a Blockseminar after the end of the semester on Wednesday, 21.02.2007, and Thursday, 22.02.2007.
• The seminar will take place in room 101.01.009/013.
• The slides for the presentation must be shown to the supervisor before Friday, 2.2.2007, 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 28th, 2007.
• Topics have been assigned in the first meeting.

Schedule

Wednesday , Feb. 21st

• 9:00-9:45: Landmark Selection for Navigation: Sebastian Mischke [Daniel Meyer-Delius]
  • Ronen Lerner, Ehud Rivlin, and Ilan Shimshoni:
    Landmark Selection for Task-Oriented Navigation.
    In Proc. of  IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Bejing, pp. 2785-2791, Oct. 2006.
    
• 9:45-10:30: Person Tracking using Laser and Vision: Stefan Armbruster [Kai Arras]
  • Dirk Schulz:
    A Probabilistic Exemplar Approach to Combine Laser and Vision for Person Tracking.
    In Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems Conference, Philadelphia, 2006.
    

---

• 10:45-11:30: Imitation through Nonparametric Probabilistic Inference: Clemens Eppner [Christian Plagemann]  
• David B. Grimes, Rawichote Chalodhorn, and Rajesh P. N. Rao:
  Dynamic Imitation in a Humanoid Robot through Nonparametric Probabilistic Inference.
  In Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems Conference, Philadelphia, 2006.
• 11:30-12:15: Self-Supervised Online Learning: Thomas Keller [Christian Plagemann]
  • Boris Sofman, Ellie Lin, J. Andrew Bagnell, Nicolas Vandapel, and Anthony Stentz:
    Improving Robot Navigation Through Self-Supervised Online Learning.
    In Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems Conference, Philadelphia, 2006.
    

---

Lunch break

---

• 13:15-14:00: Mapping with Fingerprints of Places: Daniel Maier [Sven Behnke]
  • Adriana Tapus and Roland Siegwart:
    A Cognitive Modeling of Space using Fingerprints of Places for Mobile Robot Navigation.
    In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Orlando, May 2006.
  • Adriana Tapus and Roland Siegwart:
    Incremental Robot Mapping with Fingerprints of Places.
    In Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Edmonton, 2005.
• 14:00-14:45: Real-time 3D SLAM for Humanoid Robots: Matthias Laquai [Óscar Martínez Mozos]
  • Olivier Stasse, Andrew J. Davison, Ramzi Sellaouti, and Kazuhito Yokoi:
    Real-time 3D SLAM for Humanoid Robot considering Pattern Generator Information.
    In Proc. of  IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Bejing, pp. 348-355, Oct. 2006.
    
  • Andrew J. Davison:
    Real-time simultaneous localisation and mapping with a single camera.
    In Proceedings of 9th IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), Nice, vol 2, pp. 1403-1410, 2003. 
  • Link to additional Material.
    

Thursday , Feb. 22nd

• 9:00-9:45: Fast Iterative Alignment of Pose Graphs: Kerstin Haring [Giorgio Grisetti]
  • Edwin Olson, John Leonard, and Seth Teller:
    Fast Iterative Alignment of Pose Graphs with Poor Initial Estimates.
    In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Orlando, May 2006.
    
• 9:45-10:30 : vSLAM - Visual Localization and Mapping: Jörg Müller [Sven Behnke]
  • Niklas Karlsson, Enrico Di Bernardo, Jim Ostrowski, Luis Goncalves, Paolo Pirjanian, and Mario E. Munich:
    The vSLAM Algorithm for Robust Localization and Mapping.
    In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Barcelona, pp. 24-29, 2005
  • Luis Goncalves, Enrico Di Bernardo, Dave Benson, Marcus Svedman, Jim Ostrowski, Niklas Karlsson, and Paolo Pirjanian:
    A Visual Front-end for Simultaneous Localization and Mapping.
    In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Barcelona, pp. 44-49, 2005.
    

---

• 10:45-11:30: Humanoid Navigation: Pascal Bercher [Maren Bennewitz]
  • Jens-Steffen Gutmann, Masaki Fukuchi, and Masahiro Fujita:
    Real-Time Path Planning for Humanoid Robot Navigation.
    In Proceedings of the 19th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), Edinburgh, pp.1232-1237, 2005.
  • Jens-Steffen Gutmann, Masaki Fukuchi, and Masahiro Fujita:
    A Modular Architecture for Humanoid Robot Navigation.
    In Proceedings ot the 5th IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids), Tsukuba, pp. 26-31, 2005.
• 11:30-12:15: Humanoid Footstep Planning: Christoph Sprunk [Maren Bennewitz]
  • Joel Chestnutt, Manfred Lau, German Cheung, James Kuffner, Jessica Hodgins, and Takeo Kanade:
    Footstep Planning for the Honda ASIMO Humanoid.
    In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Barcelona, pp. 629-634, 2005.
  • Philipp Michel, Joel Chestnutt, James Kuffner, and Takeo Kanade:
    Vision-Guided Humanoid Footstep Planning for Dynamic Environments.
    In Proceedings of the 5th IEEE-RAS Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids), Tsukuba, pp.13-18, 2005.
    

---

Lunch break

---

• 13:15-14:00: Navigation Among Movable Obstacles: Frederic Dijoux [Sven Behnke]
  • Mike Stilman and James J. Kuffner:
    Navigation Among Movable Obstacles: Real-time Reasoning in Complex Environments.
    International Journal of Humanoid Robotics, 2(4):479–504, 2005.
  • Mike Stilman, Koichi Nishiwaki, Satoshi Kagami, and James J. Kuffner:
    Planning and Executing Navigation Among Movable Obstacles.
    In Proc. of  IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Bejing, pp. 820-826, Oct. 2006.
    
• 14:00-14:45: Gaussian Processes for Signal Strength-Based Location Estimation: Jürgen Hess [Patrick Pfaff]
  • Brian Ferris, Dirk Haehnel, Dieter Fox:
    Gaussian Processes for Signal Strength-Based Location Estimation.
    In Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems Conference, Philadelphia, 2006.