It is a significant problem to predict the 2D LiDAR map at next moment for robotics navigation and path-planning. To tackle this problem, we resort to the motion flow between adjacent maps, as motion flow is a powerful tool to process and analyze the dynamic data, which is named optical flow in video processing. However, unlike video, which contains abundant visual features in each frame, a 2D LiDAR map lacks distinctive local features. To alleviate this challenge, we propose to estimate the motion flow based on deep neural networks inspired by its powerful representation learning ability in estimating the optical flow of the video. To this end, we design a recurrent neural network based on gated recurrent unit, which is named LiDAR-FlowNet. As a recurrent neural network can encode the temporal dynamic information, our LiDAR-FlowNet can estimate motion flow between the current map and the unknown next map only from the current frame and previous frames. A self-supervised strategy is further designed to train the LiDAR-FlowNet model effectively, while no training data need to be manually annotated. With the estimated motion flow, it is straightforward to predict the 2D LiDAR map at the next moment. Experimental results verify the effectiveness of our LiDAR-FlowNet as well as the proposed training strategy. The results of the predicted LiDAR map also show the advantages of our motion flow based method.
@cite_15: The Bayesian occupancy filter (BOF) (, 2002) has achieved promising results in the object tracking applications. This paper presents a new development of BOF which inherits original BOF's advantages. Meanwhile, the new formulation has significantly reduced original BOF's complexities and can be run in realtime. In Bayesian occupancy filter, the environment is finely divided into 2-dimensional grids. Different from conventional occupancy gridmaps, in BOF, each grid has both static (occupancy) and dynamic (velocity) characteristics. In the new proposed BOF, the velocity of each cell is modeled as a distribution. The distribution for each cell occupancy can therefore be inferred using a filtering mechanism. A segmentation algorithm is implemented to extract the objects from BOF estimation. Thereafter, standard target tracking methods are employed to further analyze each object's motion. By using BOF as a pre-processing tool, the complexity of the data association is significantly reduced. Experiments using data from an indoor human tracking application demonstrate that our approach yields satisfactory results
@cite_10: To enable safe motion planning in a dynamic environment, it is vital to anticipate and predict object movements. In practice, however, an accurate object identification among multiple moving objects is extremely challenging, making it infeasible to accurately track and predict individual objects. Furthermore, even for a single object, its appearance can vary significantly due to external effects, such as occlusions, varying perspectives, or illumination changes. In this paper, we propose a novel recurrent network architecture called a recurrent flow network that can infer the velocity of each cell and the probability of future occupancy from a sequence of occupancy grids which we refer to as an occupancy flow. The parameters of the recurrent flow network are optimized using Bayesian optimization. The proposed method outperforms three baseline optical flow methods, Lucas-Kanade, Lucas-Kanade with Tikhonov regularization, and HornSchunck methods, and a Bayesian occupancy grid filter in terms of both prediction accuracy and robustness to noise.
@cite_23: Building a model of the environment is essential for mobile robotics. It allows the robot to reason about its sourroundings and plan actions according to its intentions. To enable safe motion planning it is vital to anticipate object movements. This paper presents an improved formulation for occupancy filtering. Our approach is closely related to the Bayesian Occupancy Filter (BOF) presented in [4]. The basic idea of occupancy filters is to represent the environment as a 2-dimensional grid of cells holding information about their state of occupancy and velocity. To improve the accuracy of predictions, prior knowledge about the motion preferences is used, derived from map data that can be obtained from navigation systems. In combination with a physically accurate transition model, it is possible to estimate the environment dynamics. Experiments show that this yields reliable estimates even for occluded regions.
. To estimate the motion flow of 2D LiDAR, Chen al @cite_15 proposed Bayesian occupancy filter. Gindele al @cite_23 further extended this method by incorporating prior knowledge. Choi al @cite_10 proposed a recurrent flow network. Note that, the proposed network is different from the conception in the deep learning community. The proposed network mainly consists of a context layer, which is to encode the velocity of each cell in the 2D LiDAR scan map. The velocity also can be regarded as the motion flow. All these methods model the variation of each cell and its local neighbors and then estimate the motion flow. However, the presentation ability of these shallow models usually is too weak to encode the complex problem, which leads to unsatisfying performance. Moreover, in these methods, there are many parameters to be empirically adjusted, which limits their application.