Search and rescue under the forest canopy using multiple UAVs
Name
1908.10541.pdf
Description
Accepted version
Size
9.57 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
bb4f2a1afae6641376211dc55ad9f712
Author(s)
Tian, Yulun
Liu, Katherine
Ok, Kyel
Tran, Loc
Allen, Danette
Roy, Nicholas
How, Jonathan P
Date Issued
2020
Journal
International Journal of Robotics Research
Publisher
SAGE Publications
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
© The Author(s) 2020. We present a multi-robot system for GPS-denied search and rescue under the forest canopy. Forests are particularly challenging environments for collaborative exploration and mapping, in large part due to the existence of severe perceptual aliasing which hinders reliable loop closure detection for mutual localization and map fusion. Our proposed system features unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that perform onboard sensing, estimation, and planning. When communication is available, each UAV transmits compressed tree-based submaps to a central ground station for collaborative simultaneous localization and mapping (CSLAM). To overcome high measurement noise and perceptual aliasing, we use the local configuration of a group of trees as a distinctive feature for robust loop closure detection. Furthermore, we propose a novel procedure based on cycle consistent multiway matching to recover from incorrect pairwise data associations. The returned global data association is guaranteed to be cycle consistent, and is shown to improve both precision and recall compared with the input pairwise associations. The proposed multi-UAV system is validated both in simulation and during real-world collaborative exploration missions at NASA Langley Research Center.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Aerospace Controls Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1177/0278364920929398
