2A2-Q01 Effective Localization Method for Mobile Robots in Crowded Environments Using Range Data : Wall Extraction by the Process of Data Accumulation and Near Point Deletion(Localization and Mapping)

2014 ◽  
Vol 2014 (0) ◽  
pp. _2A2-Q01_1-_2A2-Q01_4
Author(s):  
Yuusuke FUJII ◽  
Akihisa OHYA ◽  
Takashi TSUBOUCHI
Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (7) ◽  
pp. 2468
Author(s):  
Ri Lin ◽  
Feng Zhang ◽  
Dejun Li ◽  
Mingwei Lin ◽  
Gengli Zhou ◽  
...  

Docking technology for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) involves energy supply, data exchange and navigation, and plays an important role to extend the endurance of the AUVs. The navigation method used in the transition between AUV homing and docking influences subsequent tasks. How to improve the accuracy of the navigation in this stage is important. However, when using ultra-short baseline (USBL), outliers and slow localization updating rates could possibly cause localization errors. Optical navigation methods using underwater lights and cameras are easily affected by the ambient light. All these may reduce the rate of successful docking. In this paper, research on an improved localization method based on multi-sensor information fusion is carried out. To improve the localization performance of AUVs under motion mutation and light variation conditions, an improved underwater simultaneous localization and mapping algorithm based on ORB features (IU-ORBSALM) is proposed. A nonlinear optimization method is proposed to optimize the scale of monocular visual odometry in IU-ORBSLAM and the AUV pose. Localization tests and five docking missions are executed in a swimming pool. The localization results indicate that the localization accuracy and update rate are both improved. The 100% successful docking rate achieved verifies the feasibility of the proposed localization method.


2017 ◽  
Vol 36 (12) ◽  
pp. 1363-1386 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick McGarey ◽  
Kirk MacTavish ◽  
François Pomerleau ◽  
Timothy D Barfoot

Tethered mobile robots are useful for exploration in steep, rugged, and dangerous terrain. A tether can provide a robot with robust communications, power, and mechanical support, but also constrains motion. In cluttered environments, the tether will wrap around a number of intermediate ‘anchor points’, complicating navigation. We show that by measuring the length of tether deployed and the bearing to the most recent anchor point, we can formulate a tethered simultaneous localization and mapping (TSLAM) problem that allows us to estimate the pose of the robot and the positions of the anchor points, using only low-cost, nonvisual sensors. This information is used by the robot to safely return along an outgoing trajectory while avoiding tether entanglement. We are motivated by TSLAM as a building block to aid conventional, camera, and laser-based approaches to simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), which tend to fail in dark and or dusty environments. Unlike conventional range-bearing SLAM, the TSLAM problem must account for the fact that the tether-length measurements are a function of the robot’s pose and all the intermediate anchor-point positions. While this fact has implications on the sparsity that can be exploited in our method, we show that a solution to the TSLAM problem can still be found and formulate two approaches: (i) an online particle filter based on FastSLAM and (ii) an efficient, offline batch solution. We demonstrate that either method outperforms odometry alone, both in simulation and in experiments using our TReX (Tethered Robotic eXplorer) mobile robot operating in flat-indoor and steep-outdoor environments. For the indoor experiment, we compare each method using the same dataset with ground truth, showing that batch TSLAM outperforms particle-filter TSLAM in localization and mapping accuracy, owing to superior anchor-point detection, data association, and outlier rejection.


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