Cooperative Visual Mapping in a Heterogeneous Team of Mobile Robots
Mapping is regarded as one of the most fundamental tasks for mobile robots. In this work, we present an approach that enables multiple resource-limited mobile robots to cooperatively build an image-based map of the environment and to afterwards localize in it. To achieve this, we deploy a hierarchical team of mobile robots. A parent robot possesses state-of-the-art sensors, computation power and acts as a leader. It teleoperates small child robots within its line-of-sight. In contrast to other approaches and due to the cooperation among the robots, we can relax the requirement that every robot must be able to self-localize to take part in multi-robot mapping. Additionally, our algorithm ensures the mapping of the entire area in an efficient way, i.e., it fulfills the requirements of area coverage. To test our approach, extensive experiments have been performed both in simulation and real-world. In the latter case, a team of four heterogeneous mobile robots was deployed. Besides the successful cooperation in the robot team, localization results are presented to validate the applicability of the proposed mapping procedure.
Marius Hofmeister Marcel Kronfeld Andreas Zell
Department of Computer Science,University of T(u)bingen,Sand 1,72076 T(u)bingen,Germany
国际会议
2011 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation(2011年IEEE世界机器人与自动化大会 ICRA 2011)
上海
英文
1491-1496
2011-05-09(万方平台首次上网日期,不代表论文的发表时间)