Reconstructing occluded Elevation Information in Terrain Maps with Self-supervised Learning
Accurate and complete terrain maps enhance the awareness of autonomous robots and enable safe and optimal path planning. Rocks and topography often create occlusions and lead to missing elevation information in the Digital Elevation Map (DEM). Currently, these occluded areas are either fully avoided during motion planning or the missing values in the elevation map are filled-in using traditional interpolation, diffusion or patch-matching techniques. These methods cannot leverage the high-level terrain characteristics and the geometric constraints of line of sight we humans use intuitively to predict occluded areas. We introduce a self-supervised learning approach capable of training on real-world data without a need for ground-truth information to reconstruct the occluded areas in the DEMs. We accomplish this by adding artificial occlusion to the incomplete elevation maps constructed on a real robot by performing ray casting. We first evaluate a supervised learning approach on synthetic data for which we have the full ground-truth available and subsequently move to several real-world datasets. These real-world datasets were recorded during exploration of both structured and unstructured terrain with a legged robot, and additionally in a planetary scenario on Lunar analogue terrain. We state a significant improvement compared to the baseline methods both on synthetic terrain and for the real-world datasets. Our neural network is able to run in real-time on both CPU and GPU with suitable sampling rates for autonomous ground robots. We motivate the applicability of reconstructing occlusion in elevation maps with preliminary motion planning experiments.
Code (1)
Tasks
CPUGPUMissing ValuesMotion PlanningPatch MatchingSelf-Supervised LearningMethods 이 논문이 사용한 방법론
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Pixel to Elevation: Learning to Predict Elevation Maps at Long Range using Images for Autonomous Offroad Navigation
Understanding terrain topology at long-range is crucial for the success of off-road robotic missions, especially when navigating at high-speeds. LiDAR sensors, which are currently heavily relied upon for geometric mappin…
Gaussian Process Gradient Maps for Loop-Closure Detection in Unstructured Planetary Environments
The ability to recognize previously mapped locations is an essential feature for autonomous systems. Unstructured planetary-like environments pose a major challenge to these systems due to the similarity of the terrain. …
Image RegistrationLoop Closure DetectionVisual Place RecognitionA Stochastic Approach to Terrain Maps for Safe Lunar Landing
Safely landing on the lunar surface is a challenging task, especially in the heavily-shadowed South Pole region where traditional vision-based hazard detection methods are not reliable. The potential existence of valuabl…
Gaussian ProcessesTraversability Aware Autonomous Navigation for Multi-Modal Mobility Morphobot (M4)
Autonomous navigation in unstructured environments requires robots to assess terrain difficulty in real-time and plan paths that balance efficiency with safety. This thesis presents a traversability-aware navigation fram…
Point CloudsLunarDepthNet: Generation of Digital Elevation Models using Deep Learning and Monocular Satellite Images
Recent times have seen an increase in demand of high quality Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) for the lunar surface, because they are highly important for studying the moon and planning future missions. However, there is …