Collaborative Perception From Data Association To Localization

During the last decade, visual sensors have become ubiquitous. One or more cameras can be found in devices ranging from smartphones to unmanned aerial vehicles and autonomous cars. During the same time, we have witnessed the emergence of large scale networks ranging from sensor networks to robotic swarms. Assume multiple visual sensors perceive the same scene from different viewpoints. In order to achieve consistent perception, the problem of correspondences between ob- served features must be first solved. Then, it is often necessary to perform distributed localization, i.e. to estimate the pose of each agent with respect to a global reference frame. Having everything set in the same coordinate system and everything having the same meaning for all agents, operation of the agents and interpretation of the jointly observed scene become possible. The questions we address in this thesis are the following: first, can a group of visual sensors agree on what they see, in a decentralized fashion? This is the problem of collaborative data association. Then, based on what they see, can the visual sensors agree on where they are, in a decentralized fashion as well? This is the problem of cooperative localization. The contributions of this work are five-fold. We are the first to address the problem of consistent multiway matching in a decentralized setting. Secondly, we propose an efficient decentralized dynamical systems approach for computing any number of smallest eigenvalues and the associated eigenvectors of a weighted graph with global convergence guarantees with direct applications in group synchronization problems, e.g. permutations or rotations synchronization. Thirdly, we propose a state-of-the art framework for decentralized collaborative localization for mobile agents under the presence of unknown cross-correlations by solving a minimax optimization prob- lem to account for the missing information. Fourthly, we are the first to present an approach to the 3-D rotation localization of a camera sensor network from relative bearing measurements. Lastly, we focus on the case of a group of three visual sensors. We propose a novel Riemannian geometric representation of the trifocal tensor which relates projections of points and lines in three overlapping views. The aforemen- tioned representation enables the use of the state-of-the-art optimization methods on Riemannian manifolds and the use of robust averaging techniques for estimating the trifocal tensor