A set of enterprising University of Waterloo undergrads have combined mobile robotics and 3D visual SLAM to produce 3D color maps. They mounted a Kinect 3D sensor on a Clearpath Husky A200 and used it to map cluttered industrial and office environment settings. The video shows off the impressive progress and capabilities of their "iC2020" module.
The iC2020 module was created by Sean Anderson, Kirk Mactavish, Daryl Tiong, and Aditya Sharma as part of their fourth-year design project at the University of Waterloo. They formed their group with the goal of using PrimeSense technology to create a globally consistent dense 3D color maps.
Under the hood they use ROS, OpenCV, GPUSURF, TORO to tackle the various challenges of motion estimation, mapping, and loop closure in noisy environments. Their software is capable of allowing real-time views of the 3D environment as it is created. ROS is supported out-of-the-box on the Clearpath Husky, and Sean Anderson noted that "ROS was crucial to the project's success" due to its ease of use and flexibility.
Their source code is available under a Creative Commons-NC-SA license at the ic2020 project on Google Code.
Implementation details:
- Optical Flow using Shi Tomasi Corners
- Visual Odometry using Shi Tomasi and GPU SURF
- Features undergo RANSAC to find inliers (in green)
- Least Squares is used across all inliers to solve for rotation and translation
- Loop closure detection using a dynamic feature library
- Global Network Optimization for loop closure
More information: iC 20/20
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