Object-level Fusion

Summary: This repository was firstly developed when writing a bachelor's thesis, and contributes to the fusion of data from multiple sensors (the perception ones) to get the best information from each sensor.

Object-level fusion performs fusion at a higher level of abstraction and, for this reason, contributes to modularity and reuse. This work implements a software solution to address part of this reimplementation problem. It's composed of ROS 2 packages and implements the object list preprocessing from the fusion layer of an object-level fusion architecture. This preprocessing is composed of the spatial and temporal alignments, plus the objects association. Finally, this preprocessing was validated with an experiment using CARLA self-driving simulator, using as main metric the number of failed associations in some test case scenarios (check experiment).

Bachelor's thesis document

The document version that was reviewed and approved by the thesis comittee can be found at:

• University repository
• thesis/bachelors_thesis.pdf

Architecture Layers

Checked boxes means implemented in this repository

• Sensor Layer
  • ...
• Fusion Layer
  • Spatial Alignment
  • Temporal Alignment
  • Object Association*
  • State and Covariance Fusion
  • Existence Fusion
  • Classification Fusion
• Application Layer
  • ...

*implemented a simpler version

Requirements

Dockerized execution

• Linux
• Docker
• Docker Compose

Local execution

• Linux
• ROS 2 Foxy.
• Others: rosdep (from ROS) will probably install them. Check Dockerfile, and the packge files from fusion layer, and object model.

Using

Much of the usage is facilited by the run script. Under the hood it just calls docker-compose. Feel free to customize your execution by directly calling docker-compose if you're more experienced.

Executing

Execute the instructions of one of the following subsections, register your sensors, and then publish your object lists 😄

Executing (Easy, dockerized way)

Execute:

$ ./run

# Or in background:
$ ./run -d

When the application is up, it will be waiting for messages of type object_model_msgs/msg/ObjectModel on the topic objectlevel_fusion/fusion_layer/fusion/submit, and returning the list of global objects being tracked on the topic objectlevel_fusion/fusion_layer/fusion/get.

Executing in a ROS 2 workspace

Clone this project in your ROS workspace and follow the ROS 2 procedures: ref.

Registering/removing sensors and publishing object lists

Check some examples in examples (bash and python available).

Running (unitary) tests

With the application up, tests can be run with:

./run tests

Development flow

After editing the source code, if the application is up, first bring it down (calling ./run down if running in background, otherwise just CTRL+C in the terminal it's running), then:

./run compile

then, bring the application up again (./run up). Now, the modified should be in execution.

Initializing a shell

To run a shell in the container where the application is running, just execute (with the application up):

./run shell

Other commands from run

To see a list and descriptions, execute:

./run help

How to contribute

• Creating issues (questions, bugs, feature requests, etc);
• Modifying the repository: pull requests. Just make sure to describe your changes and that everything is working.