Tese: Real-Time Metric-Semantic Visual SLAM for Dynamic and Changing Environments
Aluno(a) : João Carlos Virgolino SoaresOrientador(a): Marco A. Meggiolaro e Marcelo Gattass
Área de Concentração: Mecânica Aplicada
Data: 11/05/2022
Link para tese/dissertação: https://doi.org/10.17771/PUCRio.acad.59878
Resumo: Mobile robots have become increasingly important in modern society, as they can perform tasks that are tedious or too repetitive for humans, such as cleaning and patrolling. Most of these tasks require a certain level of autonomy of the robot. To be fully autonomous and perform navigation, the robot needs a map of the environment and its pose within this map. The Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) problem is the task of estimating both map and localization, simultaneously, only using sensor measurements. The visual SLAM problem is the task of performing SLAM only using cameras for sensing. The main advantage of using cameras is the possibility of solving computer vision problems that provide high-level information about the scene, such as object detection. However, most visual SLAM systems assume a static environment, which imposes a limitation on their applicability in real-world scenarios. This thesis presents solutions to the visual SLAM problem in dynamic and changing environments. A custom deep learning-based people detector allows our solution to deal with crowded environments. Also, a combination of a robust object tracker and a filtering algorithm enables our visual SLAM system to perform well in highly dynamic environments containing moving objects. Furthermore, this thesis proposes a visual SLAM method for changing environments, i.e., in scenes where the objects are moved after the robot has already mapped them. All proposed methods are tested in datasets and experiments and compared with several state-of-the-art methods, achieving high accuracy in real-time.