Sensor Technologies and Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM)

This paper presents a sensor fusion strategy applied for Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) in dynamic environments. The designed approach consists of two features: (i) the first one is a fusion module which synthesizes line segments obtained from laser rangefinder and line features extracted from monocular camera. This policy eliminates any pseudo segments that appear from any momentary pause of dynamic objects in laser data. (ii) The second characteristic is a modified multi-sensor point estimation fusion SLAM (MPEF-SLAM) that incorporates two individual Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) based SLAM algorithms: monocular and laser SLAM. The error of the localization in fused SLAM is reduced compared with those of individual SLAM. Additionally, a new data association technique based on the homography transformation matrix is developed for monocular SLAM. This data association method relaxes the pleonastic computation. The experimental results validate the performance of the proposed sensor fusion and data association method.

Detecting glass in Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) is one of the most challenging research areas within computer and machine vision for automated scene commentary and explanation. The SLAM technique has been a developing research area in the robotics context during recent years. By utilizing the SLAM method robot can estimate the different positions of the robot at the distinct points of time which can indicate the trajectory of robot as well as generate a map of the environment. SLAM has unique traits which are estimating the location of robot and building a map in the various types of environment. SLAM is effective in different types of environment such as indoor, outdoor district, Air, Underwater, Underground and Space. Several approaches have been investigated to use SLAM technique in distinct environments. The purpose of this paper is to provide an accurate perceptive review of case history of SLAM relied on laser/ultrasonic sensors and camera as perception input data. In addition, we mainly focus on three paradigms of SLAM problem with all its pros and cons. In the future, use intelligent methods and some new idea will be used on visual SLAM to estimate the motion intelligent underwater robot and building a feature map of marine environment.

To navigate successfully, a mobile robot must be able to estimate the spatial relationships of the objects of interest accurately. A SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) system employs its sensor data to build incrementally a map of an unknown environment and to localize itself in the map simultaneously. Thanks to recent advances in computer vision and cheaper cameras, vision sensors have become popular to solve SLAM problems. The proposed bearing-only SLAM system requires only a single camera which is simple and affordable for the navigation of domestic robots such as autonomous lawn-mowers and vacuum cleaners. Existing approaches to bearing-only SLAM require the readings from an odometer to estimate the robot locations prior to landmark initialization. This chapter presents a new 2-dimensional bearing-only SLAM system that relies only on the bearing measurements from a single camera. Our proposed system does not require any other sensors like range sensors or wheel encoders. The trade-off is that it requires the robot to be able to move in a straight line for a short while to initialize the landmarks. Once the landmark positions are estimated, localization becomes easy. The induced map created by our method is only determined up to a scale factor as only bearing information is used (no range or odometry information). All the object coordinates in the map multiplied by a scale factor would not change the bearing values.

Computer vision approaches are increasingly used in mobile robotic systems, since they allow to obtain a very good representation of the environment by using low-power and cheap sensors. In particular it has been shown that they can compete with standard solutions based on laser range scanners when dealing with the problem of simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), where the robot has to explore an unknown environment while building a map of it and localizing in the same map. We present a package for simultaneous localization and mapping in ROS (Robot Operating System) using a monocular camera sensor only. Experimental results in real scenarios as well as on standard datasets show that the algorithm is able to track the trajectory of the robot and build a consistent map of small environments, while running in near real-time on a standard PC.

The simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is considered as a crucial prerequisite for purely autonomous mobile robots. In this paper, we demonstrate the mobile robot SLAM using Rao-Blackwellized particle filters (RBPF) through computer simulations under MATLAB platform, while an analytical investigation into the involved algorithms is presented. Then we make further comparisons, not only in parallel between the FastSLAM 1.0 and FastSLAM 2.0, also in vertical between FastSLAM performance and EKF-SLAM performance which used to be the dominant approach to the SLAM problem. Vivid simulations and numerical analysis make the paper illustrated with clarity and perception.

Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is a well-studied problem in mobile robotics. However, the majority of the proposed techniques for SLAM rely on the use of accurate and dense measurements provided by laser rangefinders to correctly localize the robot and produce accurate and detailed maps of complex environments. Little work has been done on the use of low-cost but noisy and sparse sonar sensors for SLAM in large indoor environments involving large loops. In this paper, we present our approach to SLAM with sonar sensors by applying particle filtering and a line-segment-based map representation with an orthogonality assumption to map indoor environments much larger and more challenging than those previously considered with sonar sensors. Results from robotic experiments demonstrate that it is possible to produce good maps of large indoor environments with large loops despite the inherent limitations of sonar sensors.

An artificial intelligent grey wolf optimizer (GWO)-assisted resampling scheme is applied to the Rao-Blackwellized particle filter (RBPF) in the simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). By doing this, we can make the diversity of the particles resampling and then obtain a better localization accuracy and fast convergence to realize indoor mobile robot SLAM. In addition, we propose an adaptive local data association (Range-SLAM) scheme to improve the computational efficiency for the algorithm of the nearest neighbor (NN) data association in the iteration of the RBPF prediction. Through the experiment and simulations, the proposed SLAM schemes have fast convergence, accuracy, and heuristics. Therefore, the improved RBPF and new data association schemes presented in this paper can provide a feasible method for the indoor mobile robot SLAM.

One major challenge of 3DTV is content acquisition. Here, we present a method to acquire a realistic, visually convincing 3D model of indoor environments based on a mobile platform that is equipped with a laser range scanner and a panoramic camera. The data of the 2D laser scans are used to solve the simultaneous localization and mapping problem and to extract walls. Textures for walls and floor are built from the images of a calibrated panoramic camera. Multiresolution blending is used to hide seams in the generated textures. The scene is further enriched by 3D-geometry calculated from a graph cut stereo technique. We present experimental results from a moderately large real environment. 1

Mapping and navigating with mobile robots in scenarios with reduced visibility, e.g. due to smoke, dust, or fog, is still a big challenge nowadays. In spite of the tremendous advance on Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) techniques for the past decade, most of current algorithms fail in those environments because they usually rely on optical sensors providing dense range data, e.g. laser range finders, stereo vision, LIDARs, RGB-D, etc., whose measurement process is highly disturbed by particles of smoke, dust, or steam. This article addresses the problem of performing SLAM under reduced visibility conditions by proposing a sensor fusion layer which takes advantage from complementary characteristics between a laser range finder (LRF) and an array of sonars. This sensor fusion layer is ultimately used with a state-of-the-art SLAM technique to be resilient in scenarios where visibility cannot be assumed at all times. Special attention is given to mapping using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) sensors, namely arrays of sonars which, being usually available in robotic platforms, raise technical issues that were investigated in the course of this work. Two sensor fusion methods, a heuristic method and a fuzzy logic-based method, are presented and discussed, corresponding to different stages of the research work conducted. The experimental validation of both methods with two different mobile robot platforms in smoky indoor scenarios showed that they provide a robust solution, using only COTS sensors, for adequately coping with reduced visibility in the SLAM process, thus decreasing significantly its impact in the mapping and localization results obtained.

The millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication technology, which employs large-scale antenna arrays, enables inherent sensing capabilities. Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) can utilize channel multipath angle estimates to realize integrated sensing and communication design in 6G communication systems. However, existing works have ignored the significant overhead required by the mmWave beam management when implementing SLAM with angle estimates. This study proposes a joint beam management and SLAM design that utilizes the strong coupling between the radio map and channel multipath for simultaneous beam management, localization, and mapping. In this approach, we first propose a hierarchical sweeping and sensing service design. The path angles are estimated in the hierarchical sweeping, enabling angle-based SLAM with the aid of an inertial measurement unit (IMU) to realize sensing service. Then, feature-aided tracking is proposed that utilizes prior angle information generated from the radio map and IMU. Finally, a switching module is introduced to enable flexible switching between hierarchical sweeping and feature-aided tracking. Simulations show that the proposed joint design can achieve sub-meter level localization and mapping accuracy (with an error < 0.5 m). Moreover, the beam management overhead can be reduced by approximately 40% in different wireless environments.

Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is becoming one of the most attractive research focuses of robot control and visual processing. In this paper, robot performs a SLAM mission in an unknown and structured indoor environment with the Microsoft XBOX Kinect obtaining visual and depth information. The line features of the object as mapping elements are extracted from visual images, and according to the extraction result, the distance between line features of the object and the robot can be obtained to portray the object edge onto the map in 2D, and the distance is provided by depth data from the Kinect. Meanwhile the robot motion model is created for the trajectory plan. A method using the extended Kalman filter (EKF) is applied to provide a pose estimate for the robot motion trajectory. The SLAM strategy is demonstrated in simulation and experimental environment.

Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is an important problem to solve in robotics theory in order to build truly autonomous mobile robots. This work presents a novel method for implementing a SLAM system based on a single camera sensor. The SLAM with a single camera, or monocular SLAM, is probably one of the most complex SLAM variants. In this case, a single camera, which is freely moving through its environment, represents the sole sensor input to the system. The sensors have a large impact on the algorithm used for SLAM. Cameras are used more frequently, because they provide a lot of information and are well adapted for embedded systems: they are light, cheap and power-saving. Nevertheless, and unlike range sensors, which provide range and angular information, a camera is a projective sensor providing only angular measurements of image features. Therefore, depth information (range) cannot be obtained in a single step. In this case, special techniques for feature system-initialization are needed in order to enable the use of angular sensors (as cameras) in SLAM systems. The main contribution of this work is to present a novel and robust scheme for incorporating and measuring visual features in filtering-based monocular SLAM systems. The proposed method is based in a two-step technique, which is intended to exploit all the information available in angular measurements. Unlike previous schemes, the values of parameters used by the initialization technique are derived directly from the sensor characteristics, thus simplifying the tuning of the system. The experimental results show that the proposed method surpasses the performance of previous schemes.

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM)consists in the concurrent construction of a model of the environment (the map), and the estimation of the state of the robot moving within it. The SLAM community has made astonishing progress over the last 30 years, enabling large-scale real-world applications, and witnessing a steady transition of this technology to industry. We survey the current state of SLAM. We start by presenting what is now the de-facto standard formulation for SLAM. We then review related work, covering a broad set of topics including robustness and scalability in long-term mapping, metric and semantic representations for mapping, theoretical performance guarantees, active SLAM and exploration, and other new frontiers. This paper simultaneously serves as a position paper and tutorial to those who are users of SLAM. By looking at the published research with a critical eye, we delineate open challenges and new research issues, that still deserve careful scientific investigation. The paper also contains the authors' take on two questions that often animate discussions during robotics conferences: Do robots need SLAM? and Is SLAM solved?

Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is a central and complex problem in robot research community. In SLAM, extended Kalman filter (EKF) implementation is widely used to localize the robot and build the environment map incrementally. In this paper, we propose a strong tracking filter (STF) SLAM algorithm. This algorithm applies STF to deal with the non-linear estimated problem in SLAM instead of EKF. It can make the performance of the nonlinear filter approximate to that of optimal linear Kalman Filter (KF), so it can construct high accuracy maps and locate the robot more accurately than EKF SLAM. Simulation experiments illustrate the superior performance of our approach compared to EKF SLAM algorithm.