EUROPA

Some of the components developed in EUROPA have been made available to the public:

• HOG-Manis is a novel error minimization approach that operates on manifolds and not in the Euclidian space. Thus, it is able to provide more accurate results for correcting pose-graphs in the context of the SLAM problem. This software package is available at openslam.org.
• G2O is an open-source C++ framework for optimizing graph-based nonlinear error functions. g2o has been designed to be easily extensible to a wide range of problems and a new problem typically can be specified in a few lines of code. The current implementation provides solutions to several variants of SLAM and BA. This software package is available at openslam.org.
• SSA2D Sparse Surface Adjustment (SSA) is a g2o-based SLAM post processing system for learning highly accurate laser maps. It constructs a joint optimization problem over robot poses and laser points based on a SLAM result and iteratively reduces pose errors and sensor errors. This software package is available at openslam.org.
• TIC-Sync is a software library that efficiently learns the mapping between distributed hardware clocks to allow precise, synchronized time stamping. TIC-Sync is an incremental algorithm, with O(1) update cost. It provides probabilistic bounds on its accuracy. TIC-Sync is not just about drastically reducing timing error, it is about knowing how good timing is. I.P. was transferred to ISIS Innovation Ltd for commercial and academic releases.
• groundHOGis a highly optimized library for GPU-based object detection with the Histograms-of-Oriented-Gradients (HOG) approach, allowing for real-time pedestrian detection. Our implementation directly integrates ground plane constraints into the detector design for an additional factor 2-4 speed-up. The library supports both region-of-interest processing and multiple detectors running in parallel sharing the same basic features. groundHOG has been released under GPL open source license and is available at http://www.mmp.rwth-aachen.de/projects/groundhog.
• Doppia is the open source release of the method that enables pedestrian detection with state of the art quality at 140 Hz on a CPU+GPU desktop machine, and 80 Hz on a laptop. This is the detector used in the final version of the EUROPA robot. The code is released with a research only license and is available at https://bitbucket.org/rodrigob/doppia.