TY  - JOUR
A1  - Du, Shitong
A1  - Lauterbach, Helge A.
A1  - Li, Xuyou
A1  - Demisse, Girum G.
A1  - Borrmann, Dorit
A1  - Nüchter, Andreas
T1  - Curvefusion — A Method for Combining Estimated Trajectories with Applications to SLAM and Time-Calibration
T2  - Sensors
N2  - Mapping and localization of mobile robots in an unknown environment are essential for most high-level operations like autonomous navigation or exploration. This paper presents a novel approach for combining estimated trajectories, namely curvefusion. The robot used in the experiments is equipped with a horizontally mounted 2D profiler, a constantly spinning 3D laser scanner and a GPS module. The proposed algorithm first combines trajectories from different sensors to optimize poses of the planar three degrees of freedom (DoF) trajectory, which is then fed into continuous-time simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) to further improve the trajectory. While state-of-the-art multi-sensor fusion methods mainly focus on probabilistic methods, our approach instead adopts a deformation-based method to optimize poses. To this end, a similarity metric for curved shapes is introduced into the robotics community to fuse the estimated trajectories. Additionally, a shape-based point correspondence estimation method is applied to the multi-sensor time calibration. Experiments show that the proposed fusion method can achieve relatively better accuracy, even if the error of the trajectory before fusion is large, which demonstrates that our method can still maintain a certain degree of accuracy in an environment where typical pose estimation methods have poor performance. In addition, the proposed time-calibration method also achieves high accuracy in estimating point correspondences.
KW  - mapping
KW  - continuous-time SLAM
KW  - deformation-based method
KW  - time calibration
Y1  - 2020
UR  - https://opus.bibliothek.uni-wuerzburg.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/21998
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-219988
SN  - 1424-8220
VL  - 20
IS  - 23
ER  -