Terrain Inclination Aided Three Dimensional Localization and Mapping for an Outdoor Mobile Robot
This work addresses localization and mapping challenges for outdoor mobile robots, presenting an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackles 3D localization and mapping for outdoor mobile robots by combining terrain inclination-based localization with the ICP algorithm, resulting in reduced time consumption and improved accuracy.
A new 3D localization and mapping techinque with terrain inclination assistance is proposed in this paper to allow a robot to identify its location and build a global map in an outdoor environment. The Iterative Closest Points (ICP) algorithm and terrain inclination-based localization are combined together to achieve accurate and fast localization and mapping. Inclinations of the terrains the robot navigates are used to achieve local localization during the interval between two laser scans. Using the results of the above localization as the initial condition, the ICP algorithm is then applied to align the overlapped laser scan maps to update the overhanging obstacles for building a global map of the surrounding area. Comprehensive experiments were carried out for the validation of the proposed 3D localization and mapping technique. The experimental results show that the proposed technique could reduce time consumption and improve the accuracy of the performance.