CAREER: Autonomous and Assistive Trail Following

University Of Delaware, Newark DE

Investigators

Abstract

CAREER: Autonomous and Assistive Trail Following PI: Christopher Rasmussen Abstract: This project will study algorithms for finding and following trails, both in the context of autonomous mobile robots and assistive devices that may be mounted on vehicles or carried by people. Paths along the ground are ubiquitous features of man-made and natural outdoor environments, "showing the way" to those who can recognize them and ``smoothing the way'' to ease passage. These two functions place each path along a spectrum of distinctiveness and traversability, which bear on the difficulty of the perceptual and control tasks, respectively, that following it poses. Trails occupy the more tenuous ends of both axes, comprising dirt and other unimproved roads as well as true hiking trails. A unique characteristic exhibited by some trails is discontinuity, in which visual markers such as cairns, blazes, footprints, and other "tells" indicate a sequence of waypoints. The research will focus on computer vision and robotic problems stemming from three core trail following tasks: (1) keeping, or discriminating and staying on continuous and discontinuous trails; (2) negotiation, or avoiding within-trail obstacles and setting control policies appropriate to changing terrain conditions; and (3) finding trails and mapping unknown trail networks, including detecting branches, dead-ends, and discontinuities. Using stereo color cameras, GPS, static aerial imagery, and topographical data, the PI will investigate (1) Texture-based methods for robust segmentation to incorporate rich models of natural image statistics, (2) On-line visual tracking and activity analysis of other mobile agents for efficiently learning control policies, and (3) Integration of directed search, recognition, and footprint structure estimation algorithms for discontinuous trails. The benefits of robust trail following skills will extend to wheeled, walking, and low-and-slow-flying robots, with applications including resupply of difficult-to-reach camps and research stations, inspection and maintenance of trails, and patrolling and reconnaissance operations as part of a border security or military force. Assistive applications include augmenting driver awareness on dangerous roads, guiding for visually-impaired hikers, and as a smart device for wildlife study through animal tracking and search-and-rescue efforts through person tracking. Educational impacts will derive from extensive involvement in this work by students from the graduate level down through high school. The PI will start an undergraduate team to compete in national robot competitions in order to encourage participation in vision and robotics research, run a program of summer internships for high school and undergraduate students to help program and test aspects of the trail following system, and introduce a novel web-based system to allow a wider group of students to contribute to the research through image segmentation and video annotation to provide data for robot learning. URL: http://vision.cis.udel.edu/trails