Full STEAM Ahead at IROS 2015

Sean Anderson presented our paper, "Full STEAM Ahead: Exactly Sparse Gaussian Process Regression for Batch Continuous-Time Trajectory Estimation on SE(3)", today at IROS 2015 in Hamburg.  He got a huge audience and most of them are even looking at the screen!  Time to relax and enjoy the conference.

FSR 2015 is Done

Last week we hosted Field and Service Robotics (FSR) 2015 at the University of Toronto and it was a big success.  The weather was beautiful for our boat cruise and live demos and all the social events were great.   UTIAS presented 4 papers and they all seemed to be well received.  Thanks to everybody who participated in the organization and execution of the conference; it was absolutely a team effort and the results were worth it.  Just need to take care of some closing tasks and it will be done done.  There's a great article on FSR at Robohub.

Grizzlies Belong in the Woods

Spring has sprung and our Grizzly is on the prowl again.  The image on the right shows the Grizzly autonomously repeating a route using vision at 3.5 m/s through a wooded area.  This is easier said than done as there are a multitude of hazards that must be avoided.  We demonstrate the route we want to drive to the robot.  Then, our path-tracking controller gradually increases speed in sections of the path where it can keep errors within user-defined bounds; it therefore learns to drive quickly while keeping path-tracking errors very low.

Winter Wonderland

Winter is here...brrr.  We've been working on getting our visual teach and repeat navigation framework to work in some difficult conditions.  Snow is one of those conditions.  It's terrible for both traction (lots of wheel slip) as well as vision systems (very few stable features and changing geometry from one day to the next).  Multiple cameras seems to help quite a bit and we hope to have some results of this testing submitted to the next edition of Field and Service Robotics, which will be held in Toronto in June, 2015.