Object-Based Reliable Visual Navigation for Mobile Robot

A Novel Obstacle Traversal Method for Multiple Robotic Fish Based on Cross-Modal Variational Autoencoders and Imitation Learning

Precision control of multiple robotic fish visual navigation in complex underwater environments has long been a challenging issue in the field of underwater robotics. To address this problem, this paper proposes a multi-robot fish obstacle traversal technique based on the combination of cross-modal variational autoencoder (CM-VAE) and imitation learning. Firstly, the overall framework of the robotic fish control system is introduced, where the first-person view of the robotic fish is encoded into a low-dimensional latent space using CM-VAE, and then different latent features in the space are mapped to the velocity commands of the robotic fish through imitation learning. Finally, to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, experiments are conducted on linear, S-shaped, and circular gate frame trajectories with both single and multiple robotic fish. Analysis reveals that the visual navigation method proposed in this paper can stably traverse various types of gate frame trajectories. Compared to end-to-end learning and purely unsupervised image reconstruction, the proposed control strategy demonstrates superior performance, offering a new solution for the intelligent navigation of robotic fish in complex environments.

Cross-Domain Indoor Visual Place Recognition for Mobile Robot via Generalization Using Style Augmentation

The article presents an algorithm for the multi-domain visual recognition of an indoor place. It is based on a convolutional neural network and style randomization. The authors proposed a scene classification mechanism and improved the performance of the models based on synthetic and real data from various domains. In the proposed dataset, a domain change was defined as a camera model change. A dataset of images collected from several rooms was used to show different scenarios, human actions, equipment changes, and lighting conditions. The proposed method was tested in a scene classification problem where multi-domain data were used. The basis was a transfer learning approach with an extension style applied to various combinations of source and target data. The focus was on improving the unknown domain score and multi-domain support. The results of the experiments were analyzed in the context of data collected on a humanoid robot. The article shows that the average score was the highest for the use of multi-domain data and data style enhancement. The method of obtaining average results for the proposed method reached the level of 92.08%. The result obtained by another research team was corrected.

Particle Swarm Algorithm Path-Planning Method for Mobile Robots Based on Artificial Potential Fields

Path planning is an important part of the navigation control system of mobile robots since it plays a decisive role in whether mobile robots can realize autonomy and intelligence. The particle swarm algorithm can effectively solve the path-planning problem of a mobile robot, but the traditional particle swarm algorithm has the problems of a too-long path, poor global search ability, and local development ability. Moreover, the existence of obstacles makes the actual environment more complex, thus putting forward more stringent requirements on the environmental adaptation ability, path-planning accuracy, and path-planning efficiency of mobile robots. In this study, an artificial potential field-based particle swarm algorithm (apfrPSO) was proposed. First, the method generates robot planning paths by adjusting the inertia weight parameter and ranking the position vector of particles (rPSO), and second, the artificial potential field method is introduced. Through comparative numerical experiments with other state-of-the-art algorithms, the results show that the algorithm proposed was very competitive.

Diversity Learning Based on Multi-Latent Space for Medical Image Visual Question Generation

Auxiliary clinical diagnosis has been researched to solve unevenly and insufficiently distributed clinical resources. However, auxiliary diagnosis is still dominated by human physicians, and how to make intelligent systems more involved in the diagnosis process is gradually becoming a concern. An interactive automated clinical diagnosis with a question-answering system and a question generation system can capture a patient's conditions from multiple perspectives with less physician involvement by asking different questions to drive and guide the diagnosis. This clinical diagnosis process requires diverse information to evaluate a patient from different perspectives to obtain an accurate diagnosis. Recently proposed medical question generation systems have not considered diversity. Thus, we propose a diversity learning-based visual question generation model using a multi-latent space to generate informative question sets from medical images. The proposed method generates various questions by embedding visual and language information in different latent spaces, whose diversity is trained by our newly proposed loss. We have also added control over the categories of generated questions, making the generated questions directional. Furthermore, we use a new metric named similarity to accurately evaluate the proposed model's performance. The experimental results on the Slake and VQA-RAD datasets demonstrate that the proposed method can generate questions with diverse information. Our model works with an answering model for interactive automated clinical diagnosis and generates datasets to replace the process of annotation that incurs huge labor costs.

An Overview on Visual SLAM: From Tradition to Semantic

Visual SLAM (VSLAM) has been developing rapidly due to its advantages of low-cost sensors, the easy fusion of other sensors, and richer environmental information. Traditional visionbased SLAM research has made many achievements, but it may fail to achieve wished results in challenging environments. Deep learning has promoted the development of computer vision, and the combination of deep learning and SLAM has attracted more and more attention. Semantic information, as high-level environmental information, can enable robots to better understand the surrounding environment. This paper introduces the development of VSLAM technology from two aspects: traditional VSLAM and semantic VSLAM combined with deep learning. For traditional VSLAM, we summarize the advantages and disadvantages of indirect and direct methods in detail and give some classical VSLAM open-source algorithms. In addition, we focus on the development of semantic VSLAM based on deep learning. Starting with typical neural networks CNN and RNN, we summarize the improvement of neural networks for the VSLAM system in detail. Later, we focus on the help of target detection and semantic segmentation for VSLAM semantic information introduction. We believe that the development of the future intelligent era cannot be without the help of semantic technology. Introducing deep learning into the VSLAM system to provide semantic information can help robots better perceive the surrounding environment and provide people with higher-level help.

Reduced Calibration Strategy Using a Basketball for RGB-D Cameras

RGB-D cameras produce depth and color information commonly used in the 3D reconstruction and vision computer areas. Different cameras with the same model usually produce images with different calibration errors. The color and depth layer usually requires calibration to minimize alignment errors, adjust precision, and improve data quality in general. Standard calibration protocols for RGB-D cameras require a controlled environment to allow operators to take many RGB and depth pair images as an input for calibration frameworks making the calibration protocol challenging to implement without ideal conditions and the operator experience. In this work, we proposed a novel strategy that simplifies the calibration protocol by requiring fewer images than other methods. Our strategy uses an ordinary object, a know-size basketball, as a ground truth sphere geometry during the calibration. Our experiments show comparable results requiring fewer images and non-ideal scene conditions than a reference method to align color and depth image layers.