Author name cluster

Taosha Fan

Possible papers associated with this exact author name in Arrow. This page groups case-insensitive exact name matches and is not a full identity disambiguation profile.

3 papers

2 author rows

NeurIPS Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Theseus: A Library for Differentiable Nonlinear Optimization

Luis Pineda
Taosha Fan
Maurizio Monge
Shobha Venkataraman
Paloma Sodhi
Ricky T. Q. Chen
Joseph Ortiz
Daniel DeTone

We present Theseus, an efficient application-agnostic open source library for differentiable nonlinear least squares (DNLS) optimization built on PyTorch, providing a common framework for end-to-end structured learning in robotics and vision. Existing DNLS implementations are application specific and do not always incorporate many ingredients important for efficiency. Theseus is application-agnostic, as we illustrate with several example applications that are built using the same underlying differentiable components, such as second-order optimizers, standard costs functions, and Lie groups. For efficiency, Theseus incorporates support for sparse solvers, automatic vectorization, batching, GPU acceleration, and gradient computation with implicit differentiation and direct loss minimization. We do extensive performance evaluation in a set of applications, demonstrating significant efficiency gains and better scalability when these features are incorporated. Project page: https: //sites. google. com/view/theseus-ai/

PDF Details

IROS Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Majorization Minimization Methods for Distributed Pose Graph Optimization with Convergence Guarantees

Taosha Fan
Todd D. Murphey

In this paper, we consider the problem of distributed pose graph optimization (PGO) that has extensive applications in multi-robot simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). We propose majorization minimization methods for distributed PGO and show that our methods are guaranteed to converge to first-order critical points under mild conditions. Furthermore, since our methods rely a proximal operator of distributed PGO, the convergence rate can be significantly accelerated with Nesterov's method, and more importantly, the acceleration induces no compromise of convergence guarantees. In addition, we also present accelerated majorization minimization methods for the distributed chordal initialization that have a quadratic convergence, which can be used to compute an initial guess for distributed PGO. The efficacy of this work is validated through applications on a number of 2D and 3D SLAM datasets and comparisons with existing state-of-the- art methods, which indicates that our methods have faster convergence and result in better solutions to distributed PGO.

Details

IROS Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Efficient and Guaranteed Planar Pose Graph optimization Using the Complex Number Representation

Taosha Fan
Hanlin Wang
Michael Rubenstein
Todd D. Murphey

In this paper, we present CPL-Sync, a certifiably correct algorithm to solve planar pose graph optimization (PGO) using the complex number representation. We formulate planar PGO as the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) on the product of unit complex numbers, and relax this nonconvex quadratic complex optimization problem to complex semidefinite programming (SDP). Furthermore, we simplify the corresponding semidefinite programming to Riemannian staircase optimization (RSO) on complex oblique manifolds that can be solved with the Riemannian trust region (RTR) method. In addition, we prove that the SDP relaxation and RSO simplification are tight as long as the noise magnitude is below a certain threshold. The efficacy of this work is validated through comparisons with existing methods as well as applications on planar PGO in simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), which indicates that the proposed algorithm is capable of solving planar PGO certifiably, and is more efficient in numerical computation and more robust to measurement noises than existing state-of-the-art methods. The C++ code for CPL-Sync is available at https://github.com/fantaosha/CPL-Sync.

Details