|
Multi-Robot Visual SLAM using a Rao-Blackwellized Particle Filter Resumen: This paper describes an approach to solve the Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) problem with a team of cooperative autonomous vehicles. We consider that each robot is equipped with a stereo camera and is able to observe visual landmarks in the environment. The SLAM approach presented here is feature-based, thus the map is represented by a set of three dimensional landmarks each one defined by a global position in space and a visual descriptor. The robots move independently along different trajectories and make relative measurements to landmarks in the environment in order to jointly build a common map using a Rao-Blackwellized particle filter. We show results obtained in a simulated environment that validate the SLAM approach. The process of observing a visual landmark is simulated in the following way: first, the relative measurement obtained by the robot is corrupted with gaussian noise, using a noise model for a standard stereo camera. Second, the visual description of the landmark is altered by noise, simulating the changes in the descriptor which may occur when the robot observes the same landmark under different scales and viewpoints. In addition, the noise in the odometry of the robots also takes values obtained from real robots. We propose an approach to manage data associations in the context of visual features. Different experiments have been performed, with variations in the path followed by the robots and the parameters in the particle filter. Finally, the results obtained in simulation demonstrate that the approach is suitable for small robot teams. |