Release Time:2019-03-13  Hits:

Indexed by: Journal Article

Date of Publication: 2016-04-01

Journal: INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ADVANCED ROBOTIC SYSTEMS

Included Journals: EI、SCIE

Volume: 13

Issue: 2

ISSN: 1729-8814

Key Words: Loop-closure Detection; 3-D Laser Point Cloud; Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)

Abstract: Online loop-closure detection serves as an essential task for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) equipped with laser scanners. Due to the inherent errors in UAVs' pose estimation, a 3-D reconstruction algorithm is adopted to perform 3-D map building, which establishes probabilistic models of the system according to the assumption of errors. To meet the demand of online loop-closure detection using sequential 2-D laser data, a robust ISW-NDT (incremental sliding-window-based NDT) approach is proposed, which compares the appearance similarity between two scans by sliding a window with fixed size. Compared with the conventional 3-D NDT approach, the proposed loop-closure detection algorithm is capable of providing superior performance in large-scale outdoor environments, achieving higher recall rate at 100% precision and ensuring successful online implementation. Experimental results show the validity and robustness of the proposed method.