mhwasil/ig_active_reconstruction_youbot

Active Visual Scene Exploration for Mobile Robots

This project uses Information Gain calculation and octomap representation proposed by Stefan Isler et al.. In this project, there is an example using flying stereo cameras for constructing 3D model in Gazebo. This work aims at developing and implementing IG to real youbot with 5 DoF arm for 3D object exploration in a RoboCup@Work environment. The motivation is that cameras have limited field of view to perceive the environment and thus the robot should be able to explore the environment. How to explore then? Where to move the camera viewpoint? Stefan Isler et al. developed a 3d object reconstruction where the object is placed at the center of the environment and the robot is programmed to reconstruc the object. Where to move the camera? Considering the mathematical model from information theory such as Shannon entropy, we can enumerate how much information about the object we can get from a particular view.