In the presented scenario, an autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) equipped with a laser scanner navigates on a inland pathway surrounded and crossed by man-made structures such as bridges and locks. GPS receiver present on board experiences signal loss and multipath reflections in situation when the view of the sky is obscured by a bridge or tall buildings. In both cases, a potentially dangerous situation is provoked as the robot has no or inaccurate positioning data. A sensor data processing scheme is proposed where these gaps are smoothly filled in by positioning data generated from scan matching and registration of the laser data. This article shows preliminary results of positioning data improvement during trials in harbor-river environment.
Several advanced, mostly experimental autonomous platforms are also dotted in the complimentary environment mapping algorithms, together constituting a simultaneous localization and mapping SLAM . The technique was also applied to underwater robots by Ribas @cite_9 , Mallios @cite_1 and others. While SLAM represents a complete localization solution, it creates a significant memory overhead due to the need to maintain a map of the environment and the computation needs due to constant new sensor data and map updates. In case of survey vehicles, creating a product-grade map of the scene for immediate navigation purpose would be impractical. Thus, some authors propose a localisation on an (partial) existing map, notably using techniques of scan matching @cite_4 . Matching a current scan to a global map yields a global position candidate. The approach taken in this work makes use of relative matching of consecutive scans without a global map.
@cite_9 @cite_1 @cite_4
2143062563 2060977605 2013117623 1489204872
This paper presents a new real-time hierarchical (topological metric) simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) system. It can be applied to the robust localization of a vehicle in large-scale outdoor urban environments, improving the current vehicle navigation systems, most of which are only based on Global Positioning System (GPS). Then, it can be used on autonomous vehicle guidance with recurrent trajectories (bus journeys, theme park internal journeys, etc.). It is exclusively based on the information provided by both a low-cost, wide-angle stereo camera and a low-cost GPS. Our approach divides the whole map into local submaps identified by the so-called fingerprints (vehicle poses). In this submap level (low-level SLAM), a metric approach is carried out. There, a 3-D sequential mapping of visual natural landmarks and the vehicle location orientation are obtained using a top-down Bayesian method to model the dynamic behavior. GPS measurements are integrated within this low-level improving vehicle positioning. A higher topological level (high-level SLAM) based on fingerprints and the multilevel relaxation (MLR) algorithm has been added to reduce the global error within the map, keeping real-time constraints. This level provides nearly consistent estimation, keeping a small degradation with GPS unavailability. Some experimental results for large-scale outdoor urban environments are presented, showing an almost constant processing time. This paper proposes a pose-based algorithm to solve the full Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) problem for an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV), navigating in an unknown and possibly unstructured environment. A probabilistic scan matching technique using range scans gathered from a Mechanical Scanning Imaging Sonar (MSIS) is used together with the robot dead-reckoning displacements. The proposed method utilizes two Extended Kalman Filters (EKFs). The first, estimates the local path traveled by the robot while forming the scan as well as its uncertainty, providing position estimates for correcting the distortions that the vehicle motion produces in the acoustic images. The second is an augmented state EKF that estimates and keeps the registered scans poses. The raw data from the sensors are processed and fused in-line. No priory structural information or initial pose are considered. Also, a method of estimating the uncertainty of the scan matching estimation is provided. The algorithm has been tested on an AUV guided along a 600 m path within a marina environment, showing the viability of the proposed approach. This paper reports on a method for an autonomous underwater vehicle to perform real-time visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) on large ship hulls over multiple sessions. Along with a monocular camera, our method uses a piecewise-planar model to explicitly optimize the ship hull surface in our factor-graph framework, and anchor nodes to co-register multiple surveys. To enable realtime performance for long-term SLAM, we use the recent Generic Linear Constraints (GLC) framework to sparsify our factor-graph. This paper analyzes how our single-session SLAM techniques can be used in the GLC framework, and describes a particle filter reacquisition algorithm so that an underwater session can be automatically re-localized to a previously built SLAM graph. We provide real-world experimental results involving automated ship hull inspection, and show that our localization filter out-performs Fast Appearance-Based Mapping (FAB-MAP), a popular place-recognition system. Using our approach, we can automatically align surveys that were taken days, months, and even years apart. This thesis describes a scalable robotic navigation system that builds a map of the robot's environment on the fly. This problem is also known as Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). The SLAM problem has as inputs the control of the robot's motion and sensor measurements to features in the environment. The desired output is the path traversed by the robot (localization) and a representation of the sensed environment (mapping). The principal contribution of this thesis is the introduction of a framework, termed Atlas, that alleviates the computational restrictions of previous approaches to SLAM when mapping extended environments. The Atlas framework partitions the SLAM problem into a graph of submaps, each with its own coordinate system. Furthermore, the framework facilitates the modularity of sensors, map representations, and local navigation algorithms by encapsulating the implementation specific algorithms module that matches submaps and a verification procedure that trades latency in loop closing with a lower chance of incorrect loop detections inherent with symmetric environments. The framework is demonstrated with several datasets that map large indoor and urban outdoor environments using a variety of sensors: a laser scanner, sonar rangers, and omni-directional video. (Copies available exclusively from MIT Libraries, Rm. 14-0551, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307. Ph. 617-253-5668; Fax 617-253-1690.)