Year: 2018

Sep 27

Lightweight Visual Tracking (LVT): source code and paper published

We have recently published the source code of our visual odometry algorithm, which supports stereo and RGB-D camera systems. 

Source code is available at: (github link).  It is compatible with ROS (Robot Operating System). 

Our journal publication was recently accepted, it is available at Sensors. This is the paper’s abstract:

Lightweight Visual Odometry for Autonomous Mobile Robots

Vision-based motion estimation is an effective means for mobile robot localization and is often used in conjunction with other sensors for navigation and path planning. This paper presents a low-overhead real-time ego-motion estimation (visual odometry) system based on either a stereo or RGB-D sensor. The algorithm’s accuracy outperforms typical frame-to-frame approaches by maintaining a limited local map, while requiring significantly less memory and computational power in contrast to using global maps common in full visual SLAM methods. The algorithm is evaluated on common publicly available datasets that span different use-cases and performance is compared to other comparable open-source systems in terms of accuracy, frame rate and memory requirements. This paper accompanies the release of the source code as a modular software package for the robotics community compatible with the Robot Operating System (ROS).

This video highlights the algorithm in action:

 

May 22

Winter 2018 – ECE473 Course Projects

Our winter semester at University of Michigan – Dearborn recently concluded. In my ECE473 Embedded System Design course, we work ARM Cortex-M microcontrollers and focus on real-time processing, embedded software architectures, and real-time operating systems.

The following two videos highlight two notable projects from this term:

RTOS System Monitor and Debugging Terminal for uCOS-II

One team developed a debugging terminal for the uCOS-II RTOS. Debugging RTOS projects can be challenging without being able to observe the state of tasks and shared resources. The team put together this video.

BLuE RTOS – Cooperative RTOS for Cortex-M4 (TI Tiva Launchpad, TM4C123)

Another team developed their own cooperative RTOS for the TI TM4C123 Microcontroller (ARM Cortex-M4 core). The team put together this video.