Environment Modeling for Cooperative Aerial / Ground Robotic Systems

Overview & Synopsis

This paper addresses the cooperative localization and visual map- ping problem for multiple aerial and ground robots. We propose the use of het- erogeneous visual landmarks, points and line segments. A large-scale SLAM algorithm is generalized to manage multiple robots, in which a global graph maintains the topological relationships between a series of local sub-maps built by the different robots. Only single camera setups are considered: in order to achieve undelayed initialization, we present a novel parametrization for lines based on anchored Plu ̈cker coordinates, to which we add extensible endpoints to enhance their representativeness. The built maps combine such lines with 3D points parametrized in inverse-depth. The overall approach is evaluated with real-data taken with a helicopter and a ground rover in an abandoned village.