James Ross


Postgraduate Research Student - Autonomous Vehicles
MEng

About

My research project

My qualifications

Master of Engineering with Honours in Aerospace Engineering (Class I)
University of Liverpool

Research

Research interests

Publications

James Ross, Oscar Mendez, Avishkar Saha, Mark Johnson, Richard Bowden (2023)BEV-SLAM: Building a Globally-Consistent World Map Using Monocular Vision, In: 2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2022)pp. 3830-3836 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)

The ability to produce large-scale maps for nav-igation, path planning and other tasks is a crucial step for autonomous agents, but has always been challenging. In this work, we introduce BEV-SLAM, a novel type of graph-based SLAM that aligns semantically-segmented Bird's Eye View (BEV) predictions from monocular cameras. We introduce a novel form of occlusion reasoning into BEV estimation and demonstrate its importance to aid spatial aggregation of BEV predictions. The result is a versatile SLAM system that can operate across arbitrary multi-camera configurations and can be seamlessly integrated with other sensors. We show that the use of multiple cameras significantly increases performance, and achieves lower relative error than high-performance GPS. The resulting system is able to create large, dense, globally-consistent world maps from monocular cameras mounted around an ego vehicle. The maps are metric and correctly-scaled, making them suitable for downstream navigation tasks.