Author : João Pedro Machado dos Santos
Release : 2013-09-01
Genre :
Kind : eBook
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Book Synopsis SmokeNav - Simultaneous Localization and Mapping in Reduced Visibility Scenarios by : João Pedro Machado dos Santos
Download or read book SmokeNav - Simultaneous Localization and Mapping in Reduced Visibility Scenarios written by João Pedro Machado dos Santos. This book was released on 2013-09-01. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) is one of the most widely researched topics in Robotics. It addresses building and maintaining maps within unknown environments, while the robot keeps the information about its location. It is a basic requirement for autonomous mobile robotic navigation in many scenarios, including military applications, search and rescue, environmental monitoring, etc. Although SLAM techniques have evolved considerably in the last years, there are many situations which are not easily handled, such as the case of smoky environments where commonly used range sensors for SLAM, like Laser Range Finders (LRF) and cameras, are highly disturbed by noise induced in the measurement process by particles of smoke. There is an evident lack of solutions to this issue in the literature. This work focuses on SLAM techniques for reduced visibility scenarios. The main objective of this work is to develop and validate a SLAM technique for those scenarios, using dissimilar range sensors and by evaluating their behavior in such conditions. To that end, a study of several laser-based 2D SLAM techniques available in Robot Operating System (ROS) is firstly conducted. All the tested approaches are evaluated and compared in 2D simulations as well as real world experiments using a mobile robot. Such analysis is fundamental to decide which technique to adopt according to the final application of the work. The developed technique uses the complementary characteristics between a LRF and an array of sonars in order to successfully map the aforementioned environments. In order to validate the developed technique , several experimental tests were conducted using a real scenario. It was verified that this approach is adequate to decrease the impact of smoke particles in the mapping task. However, due to hardware limitations, the resulting map is comprehensibly not outstanding, but much better than using a single range sensor modality. This work is part of the Cooperation between Human and rObotic teams in catastroPhic INcidents (CHOPIN) R&D project, which intends to develop a support system for small scale SaR missions in urban catastrophic scenarios by exploiting the human-robot symbiosis.
