Wi-Closure: wireless sensing for multi-robot map matching
Enabling fast and reliable search of inter-robot loop closures in repetitive environments
A.C. Kemmeren (TU Delft - Mechanical Engineering)
Javier Alonso-Mora – Mentor (TU Delft - Learning & Autonomous Control)
Matin Jafarian – Mentor (TU Delft - Team Matin Jafarian)
W. Wang – Mentor (REACT lab, Harvard)
J.F.P. Kooij – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Intelligent Vehicles)
M. Kok – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Team Manon Kok)
More Info
expand_more
Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.
Abstract
This thesis proposes a novel algorithm, Wi-Closure, to improve computational efficiency and robustness of map matching in multi-robot SLAM. Current state-of-the-art techniques connect maps with inter-robot loop closures, that are usually found through place recognition. Wi-Closure decreases the computational overhead of these approaches by pruning the search space of potential loop closures, prior to evaluation by a typical place recognition algorithm. Wi-Closure achieves this by identifying where trajectories are close to each other through sensing spatial information directly from the wireless communication signal. Then, place recognition is only performed on scans taken at locations close to each other. Wireless sensing provides information even when operating in non-line-of-sight or without existing communication infrastructure. The validity of Wi-Closure is demonstrated in simulation and hardware experiments. Results show that using Wi-closure greatly reduces computation time, by 54% in simulation and by 77% in hardware, compared with a multi-robot SLAM baseline. Importantly, this is achieved without sacrificing accuracy. Using Wi-Closure reduces absolute trajectory estimation error by 99% in simulation and 89% in hardware experiments. This improvement is due in part to Wi-Closure’s ability to avoid catastrophic optimization failure that typically occurs with classical approaches in challenging repetitive environments.