Mapping Interior Spaces With Robots And GIS

Roland Piquepaille writes "In an article about GIS and Robotics, Directions Magazine reports that architects and other professionals can now use spatially intelligent robots to collect interior space data. With such mapping robots, it's possible to capture accurate data for over 10,000 square meters per day and to easily integrate it with existing software. The article doesn't mention the sources for its illustrations about these robotic systems, so I thought I'd point them out: a company in Maine called Penobscot Bay Media. You'll find more details and pictures about these mapping robots at ZDNet."

Comments

This first attempted application for these...

[Anonymous Coward]

...was in colonoscopies, but all of the patients so far have died of massive internal bleeding.

Here's the Video

[TubeSteak]

Coralized so as not to /. their server
15 MB http://www.penbaymedia.com.nyud.net:8080/demos/Spa tial-Robotics.wmv

Re:spam spam spamity spam

[edgedmurasame]

Also useful are the pigpail and pigpile tags.

Cool

[fa2k]

Can I have my home as a CS:Source map now, please ?

Seriously though, I don't see many uses for this isolated tech. It is, however, necessary to have something like this in 'intelligent' robots.

How to Block Roland Piquepaille

[brendandonhue]

For those Firefox users that haven't seen it yet, here's the Greasemonkey script I wrote to hide Roland Piquepaille stories from Slashdot: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/5738

Enjoy

Re:How to Block Roland Piquepaille

[Dysproxia]

here's the Greasemonkey script I wrote to hide Roland Piquepaille stories from Slashdot

Why aren't you using it then?

Re:spam spam spamity spam

[onion2k]

Your 'fuckroland' comment + the pennyarcade image you have linked as your homepage = Amusingly ironic.

Re:30 years in the making

[Hrodgare]

Because modern mobile robots are only minimally similar to Shakey-- the algorithms which make mapping and localization possible are statistical, rather than logical, and Shakey was logic-based system. Furthermore, Shakey wasn't a whole lot more than a physical incarnation of a blocksworld agent. In a sense, all modern mobile robots are distantly related to Shakey-- but only in the same sense as they're distantly related to Rodney Brooks' subsumption architecture robots. I'm surprised this article is coming up as news; robots capable of mapping and localization tasks have been around for several years now, and there's a great deal of off the shelf software (open source and otherwise) capable of this.

A shameless plug :)

[Soul-Burn666]

As a small semestrial academic project, I worked on a different kind of mapping project which uses a large number of very simple (and cheap) robots instead of a small number of expensive robots like in this article.

Each robot is aware of its location through odometry (measuring the distance traveled by both the of the bot's wheels) and collision detection using, in our case, a rotating straw due to the fact we were limited to Lego Mindstorms.
Using odometry inserts a lot of error to the calculations. To counter these errors, the robots communicate over a short distance (touching distance) and average their expected location and heading.

In theory, and simulation, the algorithm proved very successful. Especially for a large number of agents.
In practice the errors were too large compared to the very small number of agents (4) we had at our disposal.

The project page.
And the simulation applet, written with NetLogo.

I wonder if they use such averaging algorithms with these robots aswell.

Re:A shameless plug :)

[w33v1l]

One technique for dealing with errors and gradual drift is the use of a covariance matrix to allow the propagation of location information through a scene. Such as in Andrew Davison's work http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~ajd/ , although this only deals with a very sparse map of feature points, using mono vision in real-time. One nice thing about his SceneLib and MonoSLAMGlow software, is that it'll work with a relatively cheap single webcam.

Another nice visual SLAM (Simultaneous Localisation And Mapping) page is Robert Sim's http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~simra/index.html , where he uses multi-camera vision to produce a much denser map.

Alternative: Time Difference of Arrival

[Ceriel Nosforit]

I've been thinking about implementing Time Difference of Arrival plus echo-locationing to do a very similar thing. Plus, this method could be used to scan in 3D with ease. Not to mention a number of other interesting applications, such as beamforming plus distance awareness.

The very same code could be used for EM for a sort of total situation awareness radar, passive and active.

Next up: death ray! Mwahahahaah!