(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2003)
Alegre, Fernando; Dellaert, Frank; Martinson, Eric Beowulf
We investigate Intrinsic Localization and Mapping
(ILM) for teams of mobile robots, a multi-robot variant of
SLAM where the robots themselves are used as landmarks.
We develop what is essentially a straightforward application
of Bayesian estimation to the problem, and present two complimentary
views on the associated optimization problem that
provide insight into the problem and allows one to devise initialization
strategies, indispensable in practice. We also provide
a discussion of the degrees of freedom and ambiguities
in the solution. Finally, we introduce two applications of ILM
that bring out its potential: Diffusion Mapping and Marco Polo
localization.
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2002)
Alegre, Fernando; Balch, Tucker; Berhault, Marc; Dellaert, Frank; Kaess, Michael; McGuire, Robert; Merrill, Ernest; Moshkina, Lilia; Ravichandran, Ram; Walker, Daniel
We describe our entry in the AAAI 2002 Urban Search and
Rescue (USAR) competition, a marsupial team consisting of
a larger wheeled robot and several small legged robots, carried
around by the larger robot. This setup exploits complimentary
strengths of each robot type in a challenging domain.
We describe both the hardware and software architecture, and
the on-board real-time mapping which forms the basis of accurate
victim-localization crucial to the USAR domain. We
also evaluate what challenges remain to be resolved in order
to deploy search and rescue robots in realistic scenarios.