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Human-aware navigation is a complex task for mobile robots, requiring an autonomous navigation system capable of achieving efficient path planning together with socially compliant behaviors. Social planners usually add costs or constraints to the objective function, leading to intricate tuning processes or tailoring the solution to the specific social scenario. Machine Learning can enhance planners' versatility and help them learn complex social behaviors from data. This work proposes an adaptive social planner, using a Deep Reinforcement Learning agent to dynamically adjust the weighting parameters of the cost function used to evaluate trajectories. The resulting planner combines the robustness of the classic Dynamic Window Approach, integrated with a social cost based on the Social Force Model, and the flexibility of learning methods to boost the overall performance on social navigation tasks. Our extensive experimentation on different environments demonstrates the general advantage of the proposed method over static cost planners.

The ARS 548 RDI Radar is a premium model of the fifth generation of 77 GHz long range radar sensors with new RF antenna arrays, which offer digital beam forming. This radar measures independently the distance, speed and angle of objects without any reflectors in one measurement cycle based on Pulse Compression with New Frequency Modulation. Unfortunately, to the best of our knowledge, there are no open source drivers available for Linux systems to enable users to analyze the data acquired by the sensor. In this paper, we present a driver that can interpret the data from the ARS 548 RDI sensor and make it available over the Robot Operating System versions 1 and 2 (ROS and ROS2). Thus, these data can be stored, represented, and analyzed using the powerful tools offered by ROS. Besides, our driver offers advanced object features provided by the sensor, such as relative estimated velocity and acceleration of each object, its orientation and angular velocity. We focus on the configuration of the sensor and the use of our driver including its filtering and representation tools. Besides, we offer a video tutorial to help in its configuration process. Finally, a dataset acquired with this sensor and an Ouster OS1-32 LiDAR sensor, to have baseline measurements, is available, so that the user can check the correctness of our driver., Comment: 19 pages, 6 figures and 22 references

Mobile robots require knowledge of the environment, especially of humans located in its vicinity. While the most common approaches for detecting humans involve computer vision, an often overlooked hardware feature of robots for people detection are their 2D range finders. These were originally intended for obstacle avoidance and mapping/SLAM tasks. In most robots, they are conveniently located at a height approximately between the ankle and the knee, so they can be used for detecting people too, and with a larger field of view and depth resolution compared to cameras. In this paper, we present a new dataset for people detection using knee-high 2D range finders called FROG. This dataset has greater laser resolution, scanning frequency, and more complete annotation data compared to existing datasets such as DROW. Particularly, the FROG dataset contains annotations for 100% of its laser scans (unlike DROW which only annotates 5%), 17x more annotated scans, 100x more people annotations, and over twice the distance traveled by the robot. We propose a benchmark based on the FROG dataset, and analyze a collection of state-of-the-art people detectors based on 2D range finder data. We also propose and evaluate a new end-to-end deep learning approach for people detection. Our solution works with the raw sensor data directly (not needing hand-crafted input data features), thus avoiding CPU preprocessing and releasing the developer of understanding specific domain heuristics. Experimental results show how the proposed people detector attains results comparable to the state of the art, while an optimized implementation for ROS can operate at more than 500 Hz., Comment: Code and data are publicly available at: https://github.com/robotics-upo/2DLaserPeopleBenchmark

This work presents the Human Navigation Simulator (HuNavSim), a novel open-source tool for the simulation of different human-agent navigation behaviors in scenarios with mobile robots. The tool, the first programmed under the ROS 2 framework, can be employed along with different well-known robotics simulators like Gazebo. The main goal is to ease the development and evaluation of human-aware robot navigation systems in simulation. Besides a general human-navigation model, HuNavSim includes, as a novelty, a rich set of individual and realistic human navigation behaviors and a complete set of metrics for social navigation benchmarking., Comment: Preprint version of the paper accepted in the RA-L Journal

Scene graph generation from images is a task of great interest to applications such as robotics, because graphs are the main way to represent knowledge about the world and regulate human-robot interactions in tasks such as Visual Question Answering (VQA). Unfortunately, its corresponding area of machine learning is still relatively in its infancy, and the solutions currently offered do not specialize well in concrete usage scenarios. Specifically, they do not take existing "expert" knowledge about the domain world into account; and that might indeed be necessary in order to provide the level of reliability demanded by the use case scenarios. In this paper, we propose an initial approximation to a framework called Ontology-Guided Scene Graph Generation (OG-SGG), that can improve the performance of an existing machine learning based scene graph generator using prior knowledge supplied in the form of an ontology (specifically, using the axioms defined within); and we present results evaluated on a specific scenario founded in telepresence robotics. These results show quantitative and qualitative improvements in the generated scene graphs., Comment: 20 pages; version accepted and published in IEEE Access

In recent years, high-speed navigation and environment interaction in the context of aerial robotics has become a field of interest for several academic and industrial research studies. In particular, Search and Intercept (SaI) applications for aerial robots pose a compelling research area due to their potential usability in several environments. Nevertheless, SaI tasks involve a challenging development regarding sensory weight, on-board computation resources, actuation design and algorithms for perception and control, among others. In this work, a fully-autonomous aerial robot for high-speed object grasping has been proposed. As an additional sub-task, our system is able to autonomously pierce balloons located in poles close to the surface. Our first contribution is the design of the aerial robot at an actuation and sensory level consisting of a novel gripper design with additional sensors enabling the robot to grasp objects at high speeds. The second contribution is a complete software framework consisting of perception, state estimation, motion planning, motion control and mission control in order to rapid- and robustly perform the autonomous grasping mission. Our approach has been validated in a challenging international competition and has shown outstanding results, being able to autonomously search, follow and grasp a moving object at 6 m/s in an outdoor environment

The paper presents a framework for fire extinguishing in an urban scenario by a team of aerial and ground robots. The system was developed to address Challenge 3 of the 2020Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge (MBZIRC). The challenge required to autonomously detect, locate and extinguish fires on different floors of a building, as well as in its surroundings. The multi-robot system developed consists of a heterogeneous robot team of up to three Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) and one Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV). We describe the main hardware and software components for UAV and UGVplatforms and also present the main algorithmic components of the system: a 3D LIDAR-based mapping and localization module able to work in GPS-denied scenarios; a global planner and a fast local re-planning system for robot navigation; infrared-based perception and robot actuation control for fire extinguishing; and a mission executive and coordination module based on Behavior Trees. The paper finally describes the results obtained during the competition, where the system worked fully autonomously and scored in all the trials performed. The presented system ended in 7th position out of 20 teams in the Challenge3 competition and in 5th position (out of 17 teams) in the Challenge 3 entry to the Grand Finale (Grand Challenge) of MBZIRC 2020 competition., Comment: The presents paper was accepted in the journal "Field Robotics" as part of MBZIRC'20 special Issues

This paper presents DLL, a fast direct map-based localization technique using 3D LIDAR for its application to aerial robots. DLL implements a point cloud to map registration based on non-linear optimization of the distance of the points and the map, thus not requiring features, neither point correspondences. Given an initial pose, the method is able to track the pose of the robot by refining the predicted pose from odometry. Through benchmarks using real datasets and simulations, we show how the method performs much better than Monte-Carlo localization methods and achieves comparable precision to other optimization-based approaches but running one order of magnitude faster. The method is also robust under odometric errors. The approach has been implemented under the Robot Operating System (ROS), and it is publicly available., Comment: Accepted for IROS2021. Associated code can be downloaded from https://github.com/robotics-upo/dll

The first aim of this work is to characterize when the lattice of all submodules of a module is a direct product of two lattices. In particular, which decompositions of a module $M$ produce these decompositions: the \emph{lattice decompositions}. In a first \textit{\'etage} this can be done using endomorphisms of $M$, which produce a decomposition of the ring $\textrm{End}_R(M)$ as a product of rings, i.e., they are central idempotent endomorphisms. But since not every central idempotent endomorphism produces a lattice decomposition, the classical theory is not of application. In a second step we characterize when a particular module $M$ has a lattice decomposition; this can be done, in the commutative case in a simple way using the support, $\textrm{Supp}(M)$, of $M$; but, in general, it is not so easy. Once we know when a module decomposes, we look for characterizing its decompositions. We show that a good framework for this study, and its generalizations, could be provided by the category $\sigma[M]$, the smallest Grothendieck subcategory of $\textbf{Mod}-{R}$ containing $M$., Comment: 18 pages

This work presents an approach to learn path planning for robot social navigation by demonstration. We make use of Fully Convolutional Neural Networks (FCNs) to learn from expert's path demonstrations a map that marks a feasible path to the goal as a classification problem. The use of FCNs allows us to overcome the problem of manually designing/identifying the cost-map and relevant features for the task of robot navigation. The method makes use of optimal Rapidly-exploring Random Tree planner (RRT*) to overcome eventual errors in the path prediction; the FCNs prediction is used as cost-map and also to partially bias the sampling of the configuration space, leading the planner to behave similarly to the learned expert behavior. The approach is evaluated in experiments with real trajectories and compared with Inverse Reinforcement Learning algorithms that use RRT* as underlying planner., Comment: Accepted to the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA'18) Brisbane, Australia, May 21-25, 2018

In this paper we deal with the problem of extending Zadeh's operators on fuzzy sets (FSs) to interval-valued (IVFSs), set-valued (SVFSs) and type-2 (T2FSs) fuzzy sets. Namely, it is known that seeing FSs as SVFSs, or T2FSs, whose membership degrees are singletons is not order-preserving. We then describe a family of lattice embeddings from FSs to SVFSs. Alternatively, if the former singleton viewpoint is required, we reformulate the intersection on hesitant fuzzy sets and introduce what we have called closed-valued fuzzy sets. This new type of fuzzy sets extends standard union and intersection on FSs. In addition, it allows handling together membership degrees of different nature as, for instance, closed intervals and finite sets. Finally, all these constructions are viewed as T2FSs forming a chain of lattices.