A Probabilistic Approach to Concurrent Mapping and Localization for Mobile Robots

This paper addresses the problem of building large-scale geometric maps of indoor environments with mobile robots. It poses the map building problem as a constrained, probabilistic maximum-likelihood estimation problem. It then devises a practical algorithm for generating the most likely map from data, along with the most likely path taken by the robot. Experimental results in cyclic environments of size up to 80×25 m illustrate the appropriateness of the approach.     

移动机器人同步定位与地图构建研究进展

同步定位与地图构建（Simultaneous localization and mapping, SLAM）作为能使移动机器人实现全自主导航的工具近来倍受关注.本文对该领域的最新进展进行综述,特别侧重于一些旨在降低计算复杂度的简化算法的分析上,同时对它们进行分类,并指出其优点和不足.本文首先建立了SLAM问题的一般模型,指出了解决SLAM问题的难点;然后详细分析了基于EKF的一些简化算法和基于其他估计思想的方法;最后,对于多机器人SLAM和主动SLAM等前沿课题进行了讨论,并指出了今后的研究方向.     

移动机器人的概率定位方法研究进展

综述了近几年来流行的移动机器人基于概率定位的各种方法,对它们的性能进行了分析比较,所有这些方法都应用贝叶斯规则作为理论基础.首先,介绍了位置跟踪广泛应用的卡尔曼滤波方法和在全局定位方面取得一定成功的马尔可夫定位方法.然后,介绍了计算效率更高的粒子滤波定位方法,即蒙特卡洛法,以及最近自适应采样的粒子滤波方法,它比简单的粒子滤波效率更高.最后, 对概率定位方法的关键技术进行了分析,并探讨了未来的发展趋势.     

A Probabilistic Approach to Collaborative Multi-Robot Localization

This paper presents a statistical algorithm for collaborative mobile robot localization. Our approach uses a sample-based version of Markov localization, capable of localizing mobile robots in an any-time fashion. When teams of robots localize themselves in the same environment, probabilistic methods are employed to synchronize each robot's belief whenever one robot detects another. As a result, the robots localize themselves faster, maintain higher accuracy, and high-cost sensors are amortized across multiple robot platforms. The technique has been implemented and tested using two mobile robots equipped with cameras and laser range-finders for detecting other robots. The results, obtained with the real robots and in series of simulation runs, illustrate drastic improvements in localization speed and accuracy when compared to conventional single-robot localization. A further experiment demonstrates that under certain conditions, successful localization is only possible if teams of heterogeneous robots collaborate during localization.     

Novel Sonar Salient Feature Structure for Extended Kalman Filter-Based Simultaneous Localization and Mapping of Mobile Robots

Abstract

Not all line or point features capable of being extracted by sonar sensors from a cluttered home environment are useful for simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) of a mobile robot. This is due to unfavorable conditions such as environmental ambiguity and sonar measurement uncertainty. We present a novel sonar feature structure suitable for a cluttered environment and the extended Kalman filter (EKF)-based SLAM scheme. The key concept is to extract circle feature clouds on salient convex objects by sonar data association called convex saliency circling. The centroid of each circle cloud, called a sonar salient feature, is used as a natural landmark for EKF-based SLAM. By investigating the environmental inherent feature locality, cylindrical objects are augmented conveniently at the weak SLAM-able area as a natural supplementary saliency to achieve consistent SLAM performance. Experimental results demonstrate the validity and robustness of the proposed sonar salient feature structure for EKF-based SLAM.     

An Active System for Three-Dimensional Localization of Mobile Robots

This paper presents an active system, which is composed of a laser range finder and four artificial reflectors, for the three-dimensional (3D) localization of a mobile robot. In this system, it will be proved that the position and the orientation of a mobile robot in a 3D space with respect to a reference frame can be determined provided that the four artificial reflectors are not installed in the same plane. Since the artificial reflectors cannot be treated as points in practice, the proposed localization procedure will be formulated as a nonlinear programming problem to account for actual sizes of the artificial reflectors. To show the validity and feasibility of the proposed method, a series of experiments will be given for illustration.     

移动机器人同时定位与地图创建研究进展

对移动机器人的同时定位与地图创建􀁫(Simultaneous Localization and Mapping)的最新研究进行了综述.指出SLAM 面临的问题,介绍了SLAM的基本实现方法.通过对各种改进的SLAM实现方法的性能对比,详尽地分析了如何降低SLAM的复杂度、提高SLAM的鲁棒性等关键技术问题,同时对多机器人协作的SLAM也进行了论述.探讨了SLAM的研究与发展方向.􀁱     

A Discussion of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping

This paper aims at a discussion of the structure of the SLAM problem. The analysis is not strictly formal but based both on informal studies and mathematical derivation. The first part highlights the structure of uncertainty of an estimated map with the key result being “Certainty of Relations despite Uncertainty of Positions”. A formal proof for approximate sparsity of so-called information matrices occurring in SLAM is sketched. It supports the above mentioned characterization and provides a foundation for algorithms based on sparse information matrices. Further, issues of nonlinearity and the duality between information and covariance matrices are discussed and related to common methods for solving SLAM. Finally, three requirements concerning map quality, storage space and computation time an ideal SLAM solution should have are proposed. The current state of the art is discussed with respect to these requirements including a formal specification of the term “map quality”. This article is based on research conducted during the author's Ph.D. studies at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Oberpfaffenhofen. Udo Frese was born in Minden, Germany in 1972. He received the Diploma degree in computer science from the University of Paderborn in 1997. From 1998 to 2003 he was a Ph.D. student at the German Aerospace Center in Oberpfaffenhofen. In 2004 he joined University of Bremen. His research interests are mobile robotic, simultaneous localization and mapping and computer vision.     

机器人自适应主动同时定位与建图新方法

针对多机器人的定位与建图受到即时定位与地图构建(SLAM)研究方法和技术不成熟的制约问题,提出一种基于扩展卡尔曼滤波(EKF)的自适应同时定位与建图方法;首先,基于EKF估计方法,将SLAM中机器人运动方式的选取问题转化为一个多目标最优控制问题,机器人选取最优化目标函数的控制输入,从而以主动的、智能的和自适应的方式探索环境;然后,将上述方法推广到多机器人SLAM中,以实现更为准确、高效和鲁棒的定位与建图;仿真结果表明,该方法大大提高了机器人建图的效率、准确性和鲁棒性;该方法用于机器人主动同时定位和建图是可行的、有效的.     

Map Management for Efficient Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM)

The solution to the simultaneous localization and map building (SLAM) problem where an autonomous vehicle starts in an unknown location in an unknown environment and then incrementally build a map of landmarks present in this environment while simultaneously using this map to compute absolute vehicle location is now well understood. Although a number of SLAM implementations have appeared in the recent literature, the need to maintain the knowledge of the relative relationships between all the landmark location estimates contained in the map makes SLAM computationally intractable in implementations containing more than a few tens of landmarks. This paper presents the theoretical basis and a practical implementation of a feature selection strategy that significantly reduces the computation requirements for SLAM. The paper shows that it is indeed possible to remove a large percentage of the landmarks from the map without making the map building process statistically inconsistent. Furthermore, it is shown that the computational cost of the SLAM algorithm can be reduced by judicious selection of landmarks to be preserved in the map.     

一种有效的移动机器人里程计误差建模方法

移动机器人里程计误差建模是研究移动机器人定位问题的基础. 现有的移动机器人里程计误差建模方法多数针对某一种驱动类型移动机器人设计, 运动过程中缺乏对里程计累计误差的实时反馈补偿, 经过长距离运动过程定位精度大幅度降低. 因此本文针对同步驱动和差动驱动轮式移动机器人平台提出了一种通用的里程计误差建模方法. 在假设机器人运动路径近似弧线基础上, 依据里程计误差传播规律推导了非系统误差、系统误差与里程计过程输入之间的近似函数关系, 进而提出一种具有闭环误差实时反馈补偿功能的移动机器人定位算法, 对定位过程中产生的里程计累计误差给予实时反馈补偿. 实验表明新算法有效地减少了里程计累计误差, 提高了定位精度.     

基于全景视觉的移动机器人同步定位与地图创建研究

提出了一种基于全景视觉的移动机器人同步定位与地图创建（Omni-vSLAM）方法．该方法提取 颜色区域作为视觉路标;在分析全景视觉成像原理和定位不确定性的基础上建立起系统的观测模型,定位出 路标位置,进而通过扩展卡尔曼滤波算法（EKF）同步更新机器人位置和地图信息．实验结果证明了该方法在 建立环境地图的同时可以有效地修正由里程计造成的累积定位误差．     

基于视觉注意的移动机器人环境3D建模

人类的视觉注意具有高度的选择性.模仿这些机制可以使得机器人对其周围环境建模更具高效、智能和鲁棒特性.本文采用视觉注意提出了一种移动机器人环境3D建模方法.该方法采用障碍物距离势函数的变化率作为显著度的度量函数,利用移动机器人提取到的场景中的特征点并结合快速均值漂移算法,实现了移动机器人周围环境中物体显著性检测,并以其为栅格先验模型,结合传感器模型、投影方法采用贝叶斯估计方法构建了环境的栅格模型.建立的模型在室内和室外环境进行了实验验证和性能评估.     

移动机器人视觉里程计综述

定位是移动机器人导航的重要组成部分.在定位问题中,视觉发挥了越来越重要的作用.本文首先给出了视觉定位的数学描述,然后按照数据关联方式的不同介绍了视觉里程计（Visual odometry,VO）所使用的较为代表性方法,讨论了提高视觉里程计鲁棒性的方法.此外,本文讨论了语义分析在视觉定位中作用以及如何使用深度学习神经网络进行视觉定位的问题.最后,本文简述了视觉定位目前存在的问题和未来的发展方向.     

A New Low Cost System for Autonomous Robot Heading and Position Localization in a Closed Area

A low cost system for the localization of mobile indoor robots is presented. The system is composed of an emitter located on a wall and a receptor on top of the robot. The emitter is a laser pointer acting like a beacon, and the receptor is a cylinder made out of 32 independent photovoltaic cells. The robot's position and orientation are obtained from the moments when the laser crosses each cell.     

移动机器人视觉惯性SLAM研究进展

在研究领域,基于滤波和基于优化是两种实现视觉惯性SLAM(同时定位与地图创建)的主导方法.本文基于这两种方法介绍视觉惯性SLAM,说明了视觉惯性SLAM的最新研究进展和关键问题,对比了几种代表性的视觉惯性SLAM框架,并对未来进行了展望.     

Bayesian Landmark Learning for Mobile Robot Localization

To operate successfully in indoor environments, mobile robots must be able to localize themselves. Most current localization algorithms lack flexibility, autonomy, and often optimality, since they rely on a human to determine what aspects of the sensor data to use in localization (e.g., what landmarks to use). This paper describes a learning algorithm, called BaLL, that enables mobile robots to learn what features/landmarks are best suited for localization, and also to train artificial neural networks for extracting them from the sensor data. A rigorous Bayesian analysis of probabilistic localization is presented, which produces a rational argument for evaluating features, for selecting them optimally, and for training the networks that approximate the optimal solution. In a systematic experimental study, BaLL outperforms two other recent approaches to mobile robot localization.     

移动机器人基于激光测距和单目视觉的室内同时定位和地图构建

该文研究了部分结构化室内环境中自主移动机器人同时定位和地图构建问题.基于激光和视觉传感器模型的不同,加权最小二乘拟合方法和非局部最大抑制算法被分别用于提取二维水平环境特征和垂直物体边缘.为完成移动机器人在缺少先验地图支持的室内环境中的自主导航任务,该文提出了同时进行扩展卡尔曼滤波定位和构建具有不确定性描述的二维几何地图的具体方法.通过对于SmartROB-2移动机器人平台所获得的实验结果和数据的分析讨论,论证了所提出方法的有效性和实用性.     

A Set Theoretic Approach to Dynamic Robot Localization and Mapping

This paper addresses the localization and mapping problem for a robot moving through a (possibly) unknown environment where indistinguishable landmarks can be detected. A set theoretic approach to the problem is presented. Computationally efficient algorithms for measurement-to-feature matching, estimation of landmark positions, estimation of robot location and heading are derived, in terms of uncertainty regions, under the hypothesis that errors affecting all sensors measurements are unknown-but-bounded. The proposed technique is validated in both simulation and experimental setups.