Distributed NeRF Learning for Collaborative Multi-Robot Perception

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Zhao, Hongrui, Ivanovic, Boris, Mehr, Negar
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Zhao, Hongrui
Ivanovic, Boris
Mehr, Negar
author_facet Zhao, Hongrui
Ivanovic, Boris
Mehr, Negar
contents Effective environment perception is crucial for enabling downstream robotic applications. Individual robotic agents often face occlusion and limited visibility issues, whereas multi-agent systems can offer a more comprehensive mapping of the environment, quicker coverage, and increased fault tolerance. In this paper, we propose a collaborative multi-agent perception system where agents collectively learn a neural radiance field (NeRF) from posed RGB images to represent a scene. Each agent processes its local sensory data and shares only its learned NeRF model with other agents, reducing communication overhead. Given NeRF's low memory footprint, this approach is well-suited for robotic systems with limited bandwidth, where transmitting all raw data is impractical. Our distributed learning framework ensures consistency across agents' local NeRF models, enabling convergence to a unified scene representation. We show the effectiveness of our method through an extensive set of experiments on datasets containing challenging real-world scenes, achieving performance comparable to centralized mapping of the environment where data is sent to a central server for processing. Additionally, we find that multi-agent learning provides regularization benefits, improving geometric consistency in scenarios with sparse input views. We show that in such scenarios, multi-agent mapping can even outperform centralized training.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_20289
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Distributed NeRF Learning for Collaborative Multi-Robot Perception
Zhao, Hongrui
Ivanovic, Boris
Mehr, Negar
Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Effective environment perception is crucial for enabling downstream robotic applications. Individual robotic agents often face occlusion and limited visibility issues, whereas multi-agent systems can offer a more comprehensive mapping of the environment, quicker coverage, and increased fault tolerance. In this paper, we propose a collaborative multi-agent perception system where agents collectively learn a neural radiance field (NeRF) from posed RGB images to represent a scene. Each agent processes its local sensory data and shares only its learned NeRF model with other agents, reducing communication overhead. Given NeRF's low memory footprint, this approach is well-suited for robotic systems with limited bandwidth, where transmitting all raw data is impractical. Our distributed learning framework ensures consistency across agents' local NeRF models, enabling convergence to a unified scene representation. We show the effectiveness of our method through an extensive set of experiments on datasets containing challenging real-world scenes, achieving performance comparable to centralized mapping of the environment where data is sent to a central server for processing. Additionally, we find that multi-agent learning provides regularization benefits, improving geometric consistency in scenarios with sparse input views. We show that in such scenarios, multi-agent mapping can even outperform centralized training.
title Distributed NeRF Learning for Collaborative Multi-Robot Perception
topic Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.20289