Technology Experiment: Landmark Based Navigation
Landmark based navigation is intended to greatly improve robot position
estimation over dead reckoning by tracking visual features in the environment
and using them as landmarks. This measurement returns bearing to the visual
feature only. No a priori knowledge regarding the position of the
landmarks is assumed, so the problem is one of simultaneously mapping and
localizing. This is analogous to being placed in a foreign environment
and using it to localize while, at the same time, building a model of that
environment.
During this field season, we will use visual tracking software to process
a sequence of panoramic images and store the bearing to each visual target
in each frame over the sequence. In addition, we will process telemetry
logs and extract steering and wheel encoder values. We will then use various
estimation methods, such as Extended Iterated Kalman Filter, Covariance
Intersection, and others, to localize the robot.
The current hardware configuration for landmark based navigation consists
of a panoramic camera connected to a framegrabber on board a dual-Pentium
PC mounted on Nomad, as well as wheel encoders and steering encoders on
Nomad's chassis. The PC will be used to log images directly from the framegrabber,
and to log NDDS messages containing telemetry while Nomad drives on the
ice. Telemetry and images will be processed off-line to produce mapping/localization
results.
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Robotic Search for Antarctic Meteorites 1998
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Send comments, questions, or suggestions to Dimitrios
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This document prepared by Michael
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