Enhancing geometric maps through environmental interactions

The deployment of rescue robots in real operations is becoming increasingly commonthanks to recent advances in AI technologies and high performance hardware. Rescue robots can now operate for extended period of time, cover wider areas andprocess larger amounts of sensory information making them considerably more usefulduring real life threatening situations, including both natural or man-made disasters. In this thesis we present results of our research which focuses on investigating ways of enhancing visual perception for Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) through environmental interactions using different sensory systems, such as tactile sensors and wireless receivers. We argue that a geometric representation of the robot surroundings built upon vision data only, may not suffice in overcoming challenging scenarios, and show that robot interactions with the environment can provide a rich layer of new information that needs to be suitably represented and merged into the cognitive world model. Visual perception for mobile ground vehicles is one of the fundamental problems in rescue robotics. Phenomena such as rain, fog, darkness, dust, smoke and fire heavily influence the performance of visual sensors, and often result in highly noisy data, leading to unreliable or incomplete maps. We address this problem through a collection of studies and structure the thesis as follow:Firstly, we give an overview of the Search & Rescue (SAR) robotics field, and discuss scenarios, hardware and related scientific questions.Secondly, we focus on the problems of control and communication. Mobile robotsrequire stable communication with the base station to exchange valuable information. Communication loss often presents a significant mission risk and disconnected robotsare either abandoned, or autonomously try to back-trace their way to the base station. We show how non-visual environmental properties (e.g. the WiFi signal distribution) can be efficiently modeled using probabilistic active perception frameworks based on Gaussian Processes, and merged into geometric maps so to facilitate the SAR mission. We then show how to use tactile perception to enhance mapping. Implicit environmental properties such as the terrain deformability, are analyzed through strategic glancesand touches and then mapped into probabilistic models.Lastly, we address the problem of reconstructing objects in the environment. Wepresent a technique for simultaneous 3D reconstruction of static regions and rigidly moving objects in a scene that enables on-the-fly model generation. Although this thesis focuses mostly on rescue UGVs, the concepts presented canbe applied to other mobile platforms that operates under similar circumstances. To make sure that the suggested methods work, we have put efforts into design of user interfaces and the evaluation of those in user studies.QC 20180411