DR-SPAAM person detector awarded !

DR-SPAAM is the September Jetson Project of the Month !​

We are excited to announce that the DR-SPAAM person detector, developed by RWTH Aachen University  for the CrowdBot project, was awarded the “Jetson Project of the Month for September 2020 by NVidia!

2D LiDARs deliver accurate range measurement in a large field of view, and are extensively used for navigation and mapping on mobile robots.  With the DR-SPAAM detector, a robot equipped with 2D LiDARs (mounted at leg height) can now detect persons in its surroundings, an important capability for safe navigation in populated environments. This is done by detecting leg patterns in the LiDAR scan using a deep neural network.

DR-SPAAM is extremely fast. It can process scans (with 450 points) at 90 Hz on a laptop with a dedicated GPU, or at 20 Hz on a Jetson AGX Xavier with an embedded GPU. In addition, DR-SPAAM can be deployed with different sensor models or configurations, thanks to its flexible design choices. It is deployed on four different robots in the CrowdBot project.