Informatica e Robotica per l’Automazione (IRA) Lab.

1. Informatica e Robotica per l’Automazione (IRA) Lab. Informatica e Robotica per l’Automazione (IRA) Lab. Dipartimento Informatica, Sistemistica e Comunicazione, Università degli Studi di Milano – Bicocca Domenico G. Sorrenti domenico.sorrenti@unimib.it http://www.disco.unimib.it/sorrenti lab. website: http://www.ira.disco.unimib.it State of the art and research perspectives at DISCo

2. Research activities • In the IRAlab we pursue research in autonomous systems; • Most of our work concerns autonomous robots; • What are autonomous robots? Let’s see 3 examples. State of the art and research perspectives at DISCo

3. Autonomous robots - example 1 State of the art and research perspectives at DISCo

4. Autonomous robots - example 2 State of the art and research perspectives at DISCo

5. Autonomous robots - example 3 State of the art and research perspectives at DISCo

6. Autonomous robots - example 4 State of the art and research perspectives at DISCo

7. Autonomous robots - example 4 State of the art and research perspectives at DISCo

8. Percezione Perception Decisione Decision Action Perception Azione Decision Action So, what are autonomous robots? A machine that receives information from its working environment by means of its sensors, and basing on this information decides autonomously what action to execute, out of the ones available, in order to pursue a given task. State of the art and research perspectives at DISCo

9. Autonomous robots as controllers complex modeling of physics control systems programming modeling of physics probabilistic reasoning programming analog and digital electronics State of the art and research perspectives at DISCo

10. Staff • Domenico G. Sorrenti, assoc. prof. • Daniele Marzorati, research assoc. • Axel Furlan, research assist. • students State of the art and research perspectives at DISCo

11. Main research topics • Vision-based SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping); • Multi-target tracking; • Benchmarking, a cultural approach, orthogonal to the topics. State of the art and research perspectives at DISCo

12. Vision-based SLAM costruzione di un modello (mappa) dell’ambiente di lavoro State of the art and research perspectives at DISCo

13. Vision-based SLAM • we tackled the uncertainty modeling problem, relevant in vision-based SLAM; • we are now at the frontier of the research, at the international level, with the “inverse scaling” parameterization; • expectations: • to consolidate the results publishing comparisons with other proposals on known benchmarks; • to handle large maps (CISLAM approach from Zaragoza); • to handle dynamic scenes; • this is a joint work with Politecnico di Milano; • cooperation: Universidad de Zaragoza, Albert Ludwig Universiteit Freiburg; State of the art and research perspectives at DISCo

14. Multi-target tracking State of the art and research perspectives at DISCo

15. Multi-target tracking • we tackled the problem of handling ambiguities in tracking, relevant in vision-based navigation (indoor and outdoor); • in this field we are now behind the frontier of the research, at the international level; • expectations: • to publish our current results in papers based on comparisons with other proposals, on known benchmarks; • to integrate with the research in SLAM o increase accuracy in both systems; • to apply our systems to both indoor (project Grandi Attrezzature 2008) and outdoor (robotic cars/buses) navigation. • cooperation: Politecnico di Milano State of the art and research perspectives at DISCo

16. Benchmarking in SLAM State of the art and research perspectives at DISCo

17. Benchmarking in SLAM • we tackled the problem of procuring datasets for benchmarking of SLAM algorithm by any research groups, in a project funded by the EEC, quite successful; • this is a “support of the research” activity, though innovation had to be brought in for: • the definition of the Ground Truth collection systems for the robot pose, • the definition of performance measures, • the definition of some algorithms, i.e., benchmark solutions; • in this field we are the frontier of the research, at the international level; • expectations: • to publish our results in papers devoted to robotic benchmarking; • to apply our SLAM research results to the collected datasets; • to maintain the lead in the field, e.g., by using the Grandi Attrezzature 2008 infrastructure for benchmarking research fields where offline datasets are not viable. • cooperation: Politecnico di Milano, Universidad de Zaragoza, Albert Ludwig Universiteit Freiburg; State of the art and research perspectives at DISCo

18. Why robotics is different? • Taxonomy of research activity: • at the conceptual level: pure pencil and paper work; • at the software implementation level: software development; • at the hardware level: robotics, and other “real” research activities. • Real example: • during the “Sant’Ambrogio” week in December 2008 about 10 people from UNIMIB and POLIMI spent the something more than one week, after preparing for this activity, collecting indoor datasets for SLAM benchmarking in the Bicocca location. • about 8 top-qualified people from UNIZR and ALUFR spent at about the same amount for checking and validating the datasets. • End of January it turned out that a bug in a newer version of the IEE1394 (Firewire) driver invalidated all such datasets. • The datasets had to be re-collected; it took about one month of full pipelined work for the same number of people, which amounts to more than one year of labor. • Pure pencil and paper research do not risk such troubles, and the same applies to pure software research. State of the art and research perspectives at DISCo

19. Conclusions • Both SLAM and multi-target tracking are required for autonomous driving, in any application: robotized car/buses, indoor autonomous navigation services, unmanned ground / air / underwater vehicles. • In a few years many robotic product will reach the market; shall we be ready for selling them or we will be just customers? State of the art and research perspectives at DISCo