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Ongoing research projects
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| 3D Semantic Mapping | | # |
In my research work I investigate the usage of point cloud based representation and reasoning techniques for building accurate, meaningful maps for mobile robots.
While 3D mapping is not a new topic, maps so far have been used solely for the purpose of navigation and localization. Adding true semantic information to a map opens
new horizons and makes its usage possible in more complex and comprehensive applications, like robot manipulation for example. Also, even though navigation based on
2D laser maps is considered a solved topic, the complexity of our world can seldomly be simplified in such a manner, and usually needs 3D representations which can deal
with dynamic changes. Altogether, this is considered a very active research topic. My work lies at the intersection of several research areas such as: computer graphics,
machine learning, probabilistic sensor perception and fusion, statistics and of course, robotics.
Within the scope of our research, we created methods for the acquisition of point cloud data (PCD) models, outlier removal, feature estimation, point cloud resampling,
registration, model fitting, segmentation, and many more. Most of these methods have already been described in the publications listed below, with the rest following
shortly.
One of the main deployment scenarios for the above mentioned methods is the Assistive Kitchen. However, everything was carefully crafted with generality in mind, therefore
they have been also successfully applied to outdoor urban, aerial, and underwater datasets.
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Relevant publications
- Radu Bogdan Rusu, Zoltan Csaba Marton, Nico Blodow, and Michael Beetz.
Learning Informative Point Classes for the Acquisition of Object Model Maps.
In Submitted to the The 10th International Conference on Control, Automation, Robotics and Vision (ICARCV), Hanoi, Vietnam, December 17-20, 2008.
- Radu Bogdan Rusu, Zoltan Csaba Marton, Nico Blodow, Mihai Emanuel Dolha, and Michael Beetz.
Functional Object Mapping of Kitchen Environments.
In Submitted to the 21st IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Nice, France, September 22-26, 2008.
- Radu Bogdan Rusu, Nico Blodow, Zoltan Csaba Marton, and Michael Beetz.
Aligning Point Cloud Views using Persistent Feature Histograms.
In Submitted to the 21st IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Nice, France, September 22-26, 2008.
- Radu Bogdan Rusu, Zoltan Csaba Marton, Nico Blodow, Mihai Dolha, and Michael Beetz.
Towards 3D Point Cloud Based Object Maps for Household Environments.
In Submitted to the Robotics and Autonomous Systems Journal (Special Issue on Semantic Knowledge).
- Radu Bogdan Rusu, Zoltan Csaba Marton, Nico Blodow, and Michael Beetz.
Persistent Point Feature Histograms for 3D Point Clouds.
In the 10th International Conference on Intelligent Autonomous Systems (IAS-10), Baden-Baden, Germany, Accepted for publication, 2008.
[PDF]
- Radu Bogdan Rusu, Nico Blodow, Zoltan-Csaba Marton, Alina Soos, and Michael Beetz.
Towards 3D Object Maps for Autonomous Household Robots.
In Proceedings of the 20th IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), San Diego, CA, USA, Oct 29 - 2 Nov., 2007.
[PDF]
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| Leaving Flatland | | http://www.ai.sri.com/project/Leaving Flatland |
The next advance for ground-based robots will be the development of
perception, planning, and control systems that will enable UGVs to
autonomously navigate in the same environments, and at the same
speeds, as their human counterparts. This autonomous capability is a
necessary prerequisite for the realization of the potential of UGVs
as tactical multipliers.
Leaving Flatland is a joint effort between SRI (Stanford
Research Institute) International, Stanford University and Boston
Dynamics/MIT. The goal of the project is to enable small (e.g.,
man-packable) UGVs to move alongside their human counterparts
through virtually any environment, whether indoor or outdoor.
I am working together with Aravind Sundaresan, Brian Gerkey, Benoit Morisset, Kurt Konolige and Motilal Agrawal, on
the 3d perception part (VO/VSLAM, point clouds, semantic maps).
In support of this new program, we propose an
exploratory project to study the key challenges in closing the loop
on autonomous perception and action in challenging terrain. The
primary objective of the proposed project is to demonstrate the first
robot to autonomously traverse challenging 3-D terrain with onboard
sensing and online processing. The robot's perception, planning, and
execution capabilities will operate in unmodified environments, both
indoor and outdoor.
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| Context-Aware Intelligent Environments | | http://awarekitchen.cs.tum.edu/ |
Intelligent sensor equipped environments can be of much greater help if they
are capable of recognizing the actions and activities of their users, and
inferring their intentions.
Understanding human activities and characterizing them into expressive and
detailed activity models is one of they key issues of today's current
pervasive computing systems. If such a system could recognize and understand
automatically its user's behavior, it could interact in a more efficient and
friendly manner. Unfortunately, the current model construction techniques
are based on supervised learning and require specifications from their human
counterparts, such as labeling the acquired sensor data. Our vision is to
build technical cognitive systems that create and use models in a
straightforward manner, by combining already existing online information
with the system's context history.
We are experimenting with fusion of sensor data streams through the usage of
wireless sensor networks and Player/Stage, for generating motion
blueprints which can be used as a starting point in building and learning
complex robotic arm movements. Our tests are being conducted on Powercube
6-DOF arms, mounted on a B21 mobile robot.
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Relevant publications
- Radu Bogdan Rusu, Jan Bandouch, Zoltan Csaba Marton, Nico Blodow, and Michael Beetz.
Action Recognition in Intelligent Environments using Point Cloud Features Extracted from Silhouette Sequences.
In IEEE 17th International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), Muenchen, Germany, Accepted for publication, 2008.
[PDF]
- Radu Bogdan Rusu, Brian Gerkey, and Michael Beetz.
Robots in the kitchen: Exploiting ubiquitous sensing and actuation.
In Robotics and Autonomous Systems Journal (Special Issue on Network Robot Systems), Accepted for publication, 2008.
[PDF]
- Michael Beetz, Jan Bandouch, Alexandra Kirsch, Alexis Maldonado, Armin Müller, and Radu Bogdan Rusu.
The Assistive Kitchen - A Demonstration Scenario for Cognitive Technical Systems.
In Proceedings of the 4th COE Workshop on Human Adaptive Mechatronics (HAM), 2007.
[PDF]
- Radu Bogdan Rusu, Alexis Maldonado, Michael Beetz and Brian Gerkey.
Extending Player/Stage/Gazebo towards Cognitive Robots Acting in Ubiquitous Sensor-equipped Environments.
In IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) Workshop for Network Robot System, 2007, April 14, Rome, Italy, 2007.
[PDF]
- Radu Bogdan Rusu, Alexis Maldonado, Michael Beetz, Matthias Kranz, Lorenz Mösenlechner, Paul Holleis, and Albrecht Schmidt.
Player/Stage as Middleware for Ubiquitous Computing.
In Proceedings of the 8th Annual Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp 2006), Orange County California,
September 17-21, 2006.
- Matthias Kranz, Radu Bogdan Rusu, Alexis Maldonado, Michael Beetz, and Albrecht Schmidt.
A Player/Stage System for Context-Aware Intelligent Environments.
In Proceedings of UbiSys'06, System Support for Ubiquitous Computing Workshop, at the 8th Annual Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp 2006), Orange County California,
September 17-21, 2006.
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| Player/Stage and its faithful companion, Javaclient(2) | | http://playerstage.sourceforge.net/,
http://java-player.sourceforge.net/ |
Player/Stage needs no introduction. If you work with robots and you never heard of it..., hmmm,
let's just say that it's time to visit its SF web page ASAP. To make it short, Player/Stage
is *the* de facto system for robotics (and ubiquitous computing) projects.
I am a Player/Stage developer. Some of my code has already been committed to the
official repository, while other things are available on
my personal Player/Stage page .
Javaclient allows development of applications for Player/Stage using the
elegancy and power of the Java programming language. The client
implements all major devices described in Player manual.
I am the main developer of the Javaclient
software package. The project is sustained by a large international
comunity of users and is being co-maintained along with Maxim Batalin @ UCLA.
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Relevant publications
- Radu Bogdan Rusu, Brian Gerkey, and Michael Beetz.
Robots in the kitchen: Exploiting ubiquitous sensing and actuation.
In Robotics and Autonomous Systems Journal (Special Issue on Network Robot Systems), Accepted for publication, 2008.
[PDF]
- Radu Bogdan Rusu, Alexis Maldonado, Michael Beetz and Brian Gerkey.
Extending Player/Stage/Gazebo towards Cognitive Robots Acting in Ubiquitous Sensor-equipped Environments.
In IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) Workshop for Network Robot System, 2007, April 14, Rome, Italy, 2007.
[PDF]
- Radu Bogdan Rusu, Alexis Maldonado, Michael Beetz, Matthias Kranz, Lorenz Mösenlechner, Paul Holleis, and Albrecht Schmidt.
Player/Stage as Middleware for Ubiquitous Computing.
In Proceedings of the 8th Annual Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp 2006), Orange County California,
September 17-21, 2006.
- Matthias Kranz, Radu Bogdan Rusu, Alexis Maldonado, Michael Beetz, and Albrecht Schmidt.
A Player/Stage System for Context-Aware Intelligent Environments.
In Proceedings of UbiSys'06, System Support for Ubiquitous Computing Workshop, at the 8th Annual Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp 2006), Orange County California,
September 17-21, 2006.
- Radu Bogdan Rusu, Radu Robotin, Gheorghe Lazea, and Cosmin Marcu.
Towards Open Architectures for Mobile Robots: ZeeRO.
In Proceedings of 2006 IEEE-TTTC International Conference on Automation, Quality & Testing, Robotics, AQTR 2006,
May 25-28 Cluj-Napoca, Romania, 2006.
[PDF]
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Past/finished researched projects
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| COGITO - Plan-based Control of Robotic Agents | | http://cogito.cs.tum.edu/ |
A key challenge for the next generation of autonomous robots is the
reliable and efficient accomplishment of prolonged, complex, and
dynamically changing tasks in the real world.
One of the most promising approaches to realizing these capabilities
is the plan-based approach to robot control. In the plan-based
approach, robots produce control actions by generating, maintaining,
and executing plans that are tailored for the robots' respective
tasks. Plans are robot control programs that a robot can not only
execute but also reason about and manipulate. Thus a plan-based
controller is able to manage and adapt the robot's intended course
of action --- the plan --- while executing it and can thereby better
achieve complex and changing goals. The use of plans enables these
robots to flexibly interleave complex and interacting tasks, exploit
opportunities, quickly plan their courses of action, and, if
necessary, revise their intended activities.
One of the grand visions in the area of plan-based robot control is
the realization of general autonomous robot control programs that
can adapt themselves to the environments they are to operate in and
to the distribution of complex tasks they are to perform. An
instance of this grand vision is a pre-programmed household robot
that knows how to clean a kitchen, how to operate a dishwasher, and
so on. Being installed in a new environment it specializes its
general plans to the specifics of the household and learns to manage
the specific agenda of household chorus that is given to it. The
robot also has to learn about the pitfalls of its tasks and its
environment and avoid them through foresight. Our research field is
still far away from realizing such competent robotic agents.
I am working on data mining/machine learning techniques as part of the COGITO project.
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| YARP (Yet Another Robot Platform) | | http://yarp0.sourceforge.net/ |
I wrote some code for
YARP,
together with Alex at the VVV'06 summer camp in Ventimigla, Italy.
You are free to do whatever you want with the code (although we are not really sure if it's
actually useful for anything), provided that you agree to respect the GPL license that accompanies
it (sometimes not explicitly).
Some of the pictures that I took during the camp are up on the
Wiki,
others on my personal
web page.
For more information about YARP, contact
Giorgio Metta
or
Paul Fitzpatrick.
I am also keeping an open eye on the project, but due to time constraints, I am not contributing that much these days.
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Downloads
- ACE (Adaptive Communication Environment) enabled IRC chat server and client -
download here;
- SimpleShape tracker (Player driver), patched and modified for YARP -
download here;
- Player/Stage driver for providing YARP images -
download here;
- YARP interface, driver and network wrapper for a XSens MTx/MTi inertial measurement unit -
download here.
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| The RedBack mobile robot |
I was part of the RedBack team in Rome, 2005 at the RoboCup Rescue Robotics camp. The goal
was to create five 'tarantula'-like mobile robots, and use Player to control them with a
joystick for rescue robotics teleoperations.
I was in charge of the Player driver and together with Alexis we hacked a copy of playernav
which we then used to control the RedBack robot. We had a webcam and a Hokuyo laser sensor
installed on the robot. To get Hokuyo URG04 working, we had to modify Toby's Player driver.
Please contact Raymond Sheh
or Adam Jacoff and/or join the
redback mailing list for additional information
about the RedBack robot. Raymond also set up a
Wiki
page.
The members of the team were:
- Masayuki Arai,
Tokyo Institute of Technology
- Michal Baczynski,
Technical University of Lodz
- Sharam Bahadori,
University of Rome 'La Sapienza'
- Timothy Jump,
Benilde-St.Margaret's School
- Alan Lytle,
NIST
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- Alexis Maldonado (!),
Techische Universität München
- Luca Marchetti,
University of Rome 'La Sapienza'
- Olof Rensfelt,
Uppsala University
- Soraia Rocha,
Universidade Nova De Lisboa
- Radu Bogdan Rusu (!),
Techische Universität München
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- Raymond Sheh,
University of New South Wales
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Downloads
You can download an alpha-stage Player driver here.
Don't forget to issue autoreconf -i -s; ./configure; make in the RedBack directory after you unpack the archive.
I uploaded some pictures from the RoboCup event. They are available at
www9.cs.tum.edu/people/rusu/events/Rome2005/.
I have also mirrored Raymond's time-lapse movie (HQ)
here.
Update (18.11.05):
New movie added.
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| The ZeeRO mobile robot | |
The project started in the Robotics Research Group at the
Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania. The goal of the
project was to create a sub-1000 Euro mobile robot, which could be
used as a standard research platform in the robotics lab.
The following things were taken into consideration:
- the mobile robot must have a modular hardware and software architecture;
- it must be programmable from a variety of programming languages (Java, C, Lisp, etc);
- the sensor system must accommodate a variety of different types of sensors (research on sensor data fusion);
- the robot should be fairly small, maximum 40cms in diameter;
- the robot must posses wireless communication capabilities, since it is expected that more robots will be built in the near future, and research subjects such as the interaction of intelligent robotic agents;
- it must have a layered, distributed central processing unit, capable of handling concurrent operations;
- and finally, it should provide sufficient I/O ports and/or interfaces for future upgrades
I was the main architect, programmer and developer of the ZeeRO project. Check my
publications
web page or go directly to ZeeRO's web page for more information.
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Downloads
You can download an alpha-stage Player driver here.
Notes:
- you need to issue autoreconf -i -s; ./configure; make in the ZeeRO directory after you unpack the archive;
- you need the Acroname libraries and headers installed /usr/local/include/acroname/aCommon;
- the driver is provided for learning/illustrative purposes only. Look at the code and see if you can find anything
useful in there. If you actually want to run it you will probably need a Gumstix connected to an Acroname Brainstem
board as shown here.
Relevant publications
- Gheorghe Lazea, Radu Bogdan Rusu, Radu Robotin, and Romulus Sime.
The ZeeRO Mobile Robot - A Modular Architecture.
In Proceedings of 15th International Workshop on Robotics in Alpe-Adria-Danube Region, RAAD 2006,
June 15-17, Balatonfüred, Hungary, 2006.
[PDF]
- Radu Bogdan Rusu, Radu Robotin, Gheorghe Lazea, and Cosmin Marcu.
Towards Open Architectures for Mobile Robots: ZeeRO.
In Proceedings of 2006 IEEE-TTTC International Conference on Automation, Quality & Testing, Robotics, AQTR 2006,
May 25-28 Cluj-Napoca, Romania, 2006.
[PDF]
- Radu Bogdan Rusu.
Modern architectures for mobile robots: Javaclient and ZeeRO. Advanced Master's Thesis,
Faculty of Automation and Computer Science, Technical University of Cluj-Napoca Romania, 2005.
Supervisor: Prof.Dr.Ing. Gheorghe Lazea (head of the Robotics Research Group, ex-rector of the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca 1996-2004).
10/10 grade awarded. In Romanian.
[PDF]
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| Robotux - a multiagent robot based security system |
One of the key problems in the process of controlling the behavior
of multirobot systems, is finding the proper algorithms which can
generate a robust, coherent and adaptive behavior. If up to a
certain (small) number of robots, the system can be easily
controlled via client-server centralized architectures, the
real-time capability of the communication system fails when the
number of robots in the robot society grows above that threshold
value.
One solution to the above problem, is the use of multiagent systems.
The integration process of a multirobot society with a multiagent
system into a heterogeneous, scalable, redundant and flexible system
becomes a necessary approach for solving some of the complex
problems associated with the behavior of autonomous multirobot
groups.
While doing my diploma work at TUCN, I made several studies of such
a complex hybrid multirobot-multiagent system, the role that an
agent plays in a distributed system, the communication mechanisms of
the agent with the physical (or simulated) robot, as well as the
communication protocols between the multiagent society members. My
final contribution was the development of a multiagent multirobot
system, by making use of the Java programming language, the ADK
agent development toolkit and the Player/Stage platform. In order to
prove the effectiveness of the resulted system, a real-life scenario
which makes use of Robotux as an integrated solution for both
security and 'housekeeping' in a given environment was presented.
The application was tested on a small scale using ActivMedia Pioneer
2DX and 3AT robots, as well as on a large scale using the 2D Stage
simulator.
The research project is in continuous development at the Robotics
Research Group, Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania.
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Relevant publications
- Radu Bogdan Rusu.
Robotux - a multiagent robot security system. Master's Thesis,
Faculty of Automation and Computer Science, Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania, 2004.
Supervisors: Prof.Dr.Ing. Liviu Miclea (head of the Automation and Industrial Informatics Department)
and Prof.Dr.Ing. Gheorghe Lazea (head of the Robotics Research Group, ex-rector of the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca 1996-2004).
10/10 grade awarded. In Romanian.
[PDF]
- Radu Bogdan Rusu, Liviu Miclea, and Szilard Enyedi.
Robotux - a Multiagent Robot Based Security System.
In Proceedings of IEEE-TTTC Automation, Quality & Testing, Robotics International Conference 2004,
Cluj-Napoca, Romania, May 13-15, 2004, AQTRJ, pp. 59-64, 2004.
[PDF]
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