quasimodo

Quasimodo - Qu(erying) A(nd) S(patio-Temporal) I(ncremental) Mod(el building of) O(bjects)

Build & Setup

The packes distributed here do note require any special setup, simply build them in your catkin workspace. Note that you will need the 2.0 branch of https://github.com/strands-project/soma (which in turn requires an up-to-date version of https://github.com/strands-project/mongodb_store). However, our packages require graphics for data fusion and visualization, the following describes how to set that up on a computer without display.

Headless Display & ElasticFusion

This package is meant to run on a robot with no screen but with Nvidia graphics card. This requires some setup every time the package is run (see the last two lines of code).

Right now, this package has a few dependencies that have to be installed manually. In the future, our ElasticFusion fork will be replaced by a new version implemented in CUDA. For now, you need to clone the repo https://github.com/stevenlovegrove/Pangolin anywhere in your computer home folder. Follow the build instructions in the readme.

Then you need to install our fork of ElasticFusion. For project members, please contact one of the maintainers and we will give you access to the code. Note that you need at least CUDA version 7 to run ElasticFusion. To get a graphics driver compatible with this version, the easiest way (under Ubuntu 14.04) is to sudo apt-get install nvidia-352.

To run these programs on a headless computer, we need to perform the following steps. First, do

sudo nvidia-xconfig -a --use-display-device=None --virtual=1280x1024

and then restart the computer. Further, we need to point to the new display that will be used in the X server that will be used by typing

export DISPLAY=:0

If you are gonna run the programs multiple times, you might consider putting this in the .bashrc. Note that this will mean that you have to set the DISPLAY again manually if you want to ssh with -X. Then, every time you restarted the computer and run the nodes, you need to run

sudo service lightdm stop
sudo /usr/bin/X :0 &

This will kill the previous X server and start a new one that works in a headless state.

Apart from these acrobatics, all you should need to do is catkin_make in your workspace.

General Info & Launching

The packages in this repo provides functionality for building a database of objects from observations in an unsupervised manner. It builds on the Metaroom paradigm for data collection. The libraries used for retrieving point clouds from several weeks of data collection can be found in https://github.com/strands-project/strands_3d_mapping/tree/hydro-devel/dynamic_object_retrieval.

For launching the pipeline for building the representation and querying on the robot, do

roslaunch quasimodo_launch quasimodo.launch data_folder:=/path/to/.semanticMap

Here, /path/to/.semanticMap is typically located in ~/.semanticMap. Please type the complete path. This will launch the necessary nodes and launch files, both for maintaining a data base of object models and for retrieving point clouds across weeks of exploration.

Visualization

Retrieval component

The easiest way to visualize the output of the retrieval (point cloud history search) pipeline is to look at the image published on the /quasimodo_retrieval/visualization topic. The leftmost image shows the masked RGB image of the query object and to the right are rendered views of the ten closest matches represented as 3D surfel clouds.

You can manually trigger a search (i.e. without using the incremental object building framework) of an object with additional views by starting

rosrun quasimodo_retrieval quasimodo_retrieve_observation

and then, in another window specifying the path to the xml of the additional views:

rostopic pub /object_learning/learned_object_xml std_msgs/String "data: '/path/to/.semanticMap/201422/patrol_run_56/room_0/2016-Apr-22 14:58:33.536964_object_0.xml'"

You can also use soma to visualize the queries over time.

Model building component

@jekekrantz Add some stuff here!

Detailed description of packages, nodes, launch files and messages

retrieval_processing

This package runs in conjunction with the metaroom nodes online on the robot. As metarooms are collected, the package continuously segments, extracts features and adds them to a feature vocabulary representation. To launch the entire pipeline, do

roslaunch retrieval_processing processing.launch data_folder:=~/.semanticMap

Nodes

Launch files

  • processing.launch - this file launches all of the above nodes. By default it does not launch retrieval_simulate_observations, this is trigged with the parameter simulate_observations:=true. It is important to set the parameter data_folder:=/path/to/metarooms to the location of the metarooms, typically ~/.semanticMap.

quasimodo_retrieval

This package provides the nodes for retrieving point clouds from the memory created by retrieval_processing. Launch everything simply with

roslaunch quasimodo_retrieval retrieval.launch vocabulary_path:=/path/to/vocabulary

where the vocabulary is most often located in ~/.semanticMap/vocabulary.

Nodes

  • quasimodo_retrieval_node - provides the service /query_normal_cloud and subscribes to the topic /models/new. If something is published on the topic, it returns the result on /retrieval_result.
  • quasimodo_visualization_server - this node simply subscribes to /retrieval_result and visualizes the query result using the tools in the package object_3d_benchmark, https://github.com/strands-project/strands_3d_mapping/tree/hydro-devel/dynamic_object_retrieval/benchmark. The resulting image is published on /visualization_image.
  • quasimodo_retrieve_observation - allows the system to bypass the model building component, instead searching for results directly using the retrieval framework. Simply publish something like rostopic pub /object_learning/learned_object_xml std_msgs/String "data: '/path/to/.semanticMap/201422/patrol_run_56/room_0/2016-Apr-22 14:58:33.536964_object_0.xml'" to retrieve more views of that object.

Other Nodes

  • quasimodo_visualize_model - this node simply visualizes the topic /models/new by integrating it into a point cloud and showing a PCL visualizer
  • quasimodo_retrieval_publisher - this node queries for all the labeled objects in a particular metaroom sweep, given by the parameter data_path.
  • quasimodo_retrieval_server - a barebones version of quasimodo_retrieval_node, simply returns the retrieved clouds without loading any images or objects masks

Launch files

  • retrieval.launch - launches quasimodo_retrieval_node, quasimodo_visualization_server and a node for fusing the incoming RGB-D frames. Takes the parameter vocabulary_path, most often this is ~/.semanticMap/vocabulary.

quasimodo_optimization

This package is a general tool for optimizing some value by evaluating some metric that comes from analyzing a rosbag. The tool package uses dynamic_reconfigure to play back the rosbag with different parameters and record the values associated with the parameters.

Can be launched with

roslaunch quasimodo_optimizer optimizer.launch

Afterwards, run plot_values.py in the folder where you ran the launch file.

Nodes

  • optimizer.py - steps through the parameters and plays back the rosbags for every parameter configuration
  • rosbag_player.py - an action server for playing back ros bags on demand
  • plot_values.py - plots the values as a heat map in parameter space

Launch files

  • optimizer.launch - launches optimizer.py and rosbag_player.py.

quasimodo_msgs

All the message and service types required for the Quasimodo framework.

Message types

  • image_array.msg - an array of images
  • int_array.msg - an array of ints
  • model.msg - a model object, consisting of point clouds, frames, camera parameters and relative transforms
  • retrieval_query.msg - message type for querying quasimodo_retrieval
  • retrieval_result.msg- message type result from querying quasimodo_retrieval
  • retrieval_query_result.msg - a combined message for querying and result
  • rgbd_frame.msg - RGD images, depth images and camera parameters
  • string_array.msg - an array of strings

Service types

  • cloud_from_model.srv - service for fusing models into clouds
  • fuse_models.srv - several models to one fused model
  • get_model.srv - get model for identifier
  • index_frame.srv - add frame to model data base
  • model_from_frame.srv - turn frame into model
  • query_cloud.srv - query retrieval using retrieval_query.msg
  • simple_query_cloud.srv - query retrieval using sensor_msgs/PointCloud2 pointcloud with normals
  • visualize_query.srv- visualize a retrieval_result.msg

quasimodo_brain

This package controlls the flow of data in the quasimodo system and maintains the database of object models. Relies heavily on the quasimodo_models package. The package also contains loaders for different formats of data, such as for example the metarooms.

roslaunch quasimodo_brain modelserver.launch

roslaunch quasimodo_brain robot_listener.launch

Nodes

  • preload_object_data - Reads data in the metarooms format. Uppon requests publishes data for the modelserver. Input: paths to a set of folders containing data.
  • robot_listener - Listenes to topic. Whenever it recieves the path to an xml file it reads data in the metarooms format from the file and publishes data for the modelserver. Input: topicname to listen at.
  • modelserver - Listens to data from input modules, uses the quasimodo_models package to register and merge models into more complete models and thereby maintain the database of objects. Input: ‘-v’ for visualization, ‘-p /path/to/folder’ to set a folder where the database is read/stored, ‘-m’ initializes the database with the data from /path/to/folder, ‘-massreg_timeout value’ sets the stopping time for the multiview registration, ‘-occlusion_penalty value’ sets the penalty value for occlusions(controlling how likeley the database is to merge models).

Launch files

  • modelserver.launch - this file launches the modelserver node without the visualization flag.
  • robot_listener.launch - this file launches the robot_listener node without the topicname set to “/some/topic”.
  • brain.launch - Launches the modelserver and the preload_object_data nodes. On automatic restart.

quasimodo_models

This package is contains libraries for registering, splitting, merging and optimizing quasimodo object models. Quasimodo object models contain RGBDFrames, Segmentation masks, Depthimages and relative poses between the data for the frames.

Original page: https://github.com/strands-project/strands_3d_mapping/blob/hydro-devel/quasimodo/README.md