Mobile Robot Programming Toolkit (MRPT)

Mentors: Student: Rachit Tibrewal

<p>Robots are slowly becoming a part of the internet of things, and easy control and universal access will be a step in future of robotics. MRPT’s Web Framework Library should address this problem.A lightweight publisher/subscriber mechanism needs to be created for MRPT. The C++ server library and the javascript library will then leverage this to create further applications. There will be two libraries, a C++ server library for RPC on the robot. Another will be a javascript library which provides modules for such procedure calls.This task involve serialization of existing mrpt objects for JSON transfer, RPC protocol, websocket setup, 3D rendering of objects in js, reusable js components for sending and receiving data from user created app where the user is largely benefitted from easy to use library methods and objects.</p>

Mentors: Student: Borys Tymchenko

<p>Many contemporary robotic applications need precise simulation and prognosing of system dynamics. Making a lightweight application that is tailored to analysis of vehicle dynamics and accurate simulation of typical robot will allow developers simple workflow with simulated robotics systems.</p>

Mentors: Student: Raghavender Sahdev

<p>Computer Vision-based application for robotics rely on extracting meaningful features from images which can be used to perform many tasks like place recognition, place categorization, tracking, Visual Odometry, SLAM, object detection, object recognition, etc. All these tasks rely on a set of key-points and descriptors that describe them. Each of the features/key-points are associated with some sort of key signatures (called descriptors of those key points). Many existing methods for detection/description of these features exists, each descriptor has certain properties that are suitable for certain vision applications. Some of the existing methods include SIFT, SURF, BRISK, FAST, ORB,AKAZE, LATCH, LSD/BLD (lines), etc. Some of the detectors already provide descriptors but some of them do not, so different combinations of descriptors can be used. In this project a GUI application is built which evaluates these descriptors/key-points. The app also provides a means to benchmark these features for certain vision tasks like Visual Odometry, Tracking and Place Recognition. A second mini project of extending the MRPT ROS package to playback MRPT Datasets in ROS RViz is also implemented.</p>

Mentors: Student: LisGein

<p>I would like to develop a new GUI application based on Qt 5.5 or next version that should be able to load data in the simplemap format and visualize it as a set of different metric maps. Also, it should allow editing robot poses to fix errors in automatic SLAM algorithms. I want to integrate my application in CMake main project of MRPT.</p>

Mentors: Student: Pranjal Kumar Rai

<p>Nanoflann is a C++ library provided by MRPT for building KD-Trees. The library is a fork of the widely-used FLANN C++ library and is mostly optimized for lower dimensional point clouds. Most ICP algorithms for robot SLAM and localization require finding nearest neighbor in 2D/3D point clouds. Support for dynamic point clouds and nearest neighbour query in non flat spaces are two paramount features which are missing in the current nanoflann library.</p>