Underworlds

Underworlds is a framework for physical, spatial and semantic situation-assessment in the context of Human-Robot collaboration.

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In this example, the robot first detect and track the objects in the scene. Then the objects pose are being corrected by a physics engine in order to compute allocentric spatial relations.

This is resulting semantic scene graph:

This software is composed by two data-structures:

1. A scene graph composed by scene nodes that contains the geometric and visual information.
2. A timeline of temporal situations that contains temporal events that can represent an action, a fact or a caption.

It also contains differents modules to generate and maintain the scene graph and the timeline from the robot camera image by integrating a CPU based perception pipeline alongwith a real-time physics engine and a probabilistic triplet store.

Main features:

• Give to the robot physical sense of his body by using the simulation engine at runtime and the /joint_states topic published by the robot.

• Compute the view of the scene graph from any pose in the 3d space to latter process with image-based reasoning.
• Detect, explain and repairs beliefs divergeance by monitoring the view of the human it interact with (called the perspective).
• Correct small inconsistencies and infer the position of objects beyond the camera field of view by using physical reasoning and detect tabletop actions by analyzing inconsistency.
• [WIP] Ground verbal expressions with rare/unknown or incomplete words by using fasttext embedding in order to match with current situations or nodes

More information in the documentation.

Quick start

Note: We assume that you have ROS installed, otherwise install it by following the instructions here.

In order to enable CUDA support (usefull for the MASK-RCNN detector), follow this tutorial and to install the kinect2 drivers follow this one.

Then follow this instructions to install Underworlds:

cd ~/catkin_ws/src # go to your catkin workspace src folder
git clone https://github.com/LAAS-HRI/uwds3_msgs.git # clone the msgs definitions
git clone https://github.com/LAAS-HRI/uwds3.git # clone the lib repo
cd uwds3 # go to the lib repo root
./download_models.sh # download dnn models
./download_word_embeddings.sh #(optional) If you want to use static word embeddings
./install_dependencies.sh # install dependencies
cd ..
catkin build # build the project to install the pyuwds3 lib

Quick launch

In different shells, run the following:

roslaunch uwds3 r2d2_upload.launch # upload a fake R2D2 robot
roslaunch uwds3 camera_publisher.launch # use the laptop/usb camera to fake the robot sensor
roslaunch uwds3 human_perception.launch
roslaunch uwds3 internal_simulator.launch

IMPORTANT: To be able to load the robot meshes in bullet you need to have the description package in the catkin_ws/src folder (exept for r2d2 that is composed only by simple primitives).

Open Rviz in another shell with the command rviz, and add the following displays:

• Image display (topic : human_perception) # the people detected by the robot
• Image display (topic : other_view) # the perspective of the human in front of the robot
• MarkerArray display (topic : corrected_tracks) # display the world corrected by the physics engine

you can monitor the output topic of type WorldStamped by running:

rostopic echo /corrected_tracks

Any problem ?

Please fill an issue with the error log and an example of code to reproduce the bug.

How to contribute

To contribute to the project, fork the repo and make a pull request