• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.79-85
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• 2018

This study focuses on autonomous exploration based on map expansion for an underwater robot equipped with acoustic sonars. Map expansion is applicable to large-area mapping, but it may affect localization accuracy. Thus, as the key contribution of this paper, we propose a method for underwater autonomous exploration wherein the robot determines the trade-off between map expansion ratio and position accuracy, selects which of the two has higher priority, and then moves to a mission step. An occupancy grid map is synthesized by utilizing the measurements of an acoustic range sonar that determines the probability of occupancy. This information is then used to determine a path to the frontier, which becomes the new search point. During area searching and map building, the robot revisits artificial landmarks to improve its position accuracy as based on imaging sonar-based recognition and EKF-SLAM if the position accuracy is above the predetermined threshold. Additionally, real-time experiments were conducted by using an underwater robot, yShark, to validate the proposed method, and the analysis of the results is discussed herein.

• International Journal of Control, Automation, and Systems
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• v.5 no.3
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• pp.251-268
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• 2007

A Gaussian sum filter (GSF) is proposed in this paper on simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) for mobile robot navigation. In particular, the SLAM problem is tackled here for cases when only bearing measurements are available. Within the stochastic mapping framework using an extended Kalman filter (EKF), a Gaussian probability density function (pdf) is assumed to describe the range-and-bearing sensor noise. In the case of a bearing-only sensor, a sum of weighted Gaussians is used to represent the non-Gaussian robot-landmark range uncertainty, resulting in a bank of EKFs for estimation of the robot and landmark locations. In our approach, the Gaussian parameters are designed on the basis of minimizing the representation error. The computational complexity of the GSF is reduced by applying the sequential probability ratio test (SPRT) to remove under-performing EKFs. Extensive experimental results are included to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed techniques.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.397-406
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• 2022

This paper presents an autonomous mobile robot (AMR) system and operation algorithms for logistic and factory facilities without magnet-lines installation. Unlike widely used AMR systems, we propose an EKF-based loosely coupled fusion of LiDAR measurements and visual markers. Our method first constructs occupancy grid and visual marker map in the mapping process and utilizes prebuilt maps for precise localization. Also, we developed a waypoint-based navigation pipeline for robust autonomous operation in unconstrained environments. The proposed system estimates the robot pose using by updating the state with the fusion of visual marker and LiDAR measurements. Finally, we tested the proposed method in indoor environments and existing factory facilities for evaluation. In experimental results, this paper represents the performance of our system compared to the well-known LiDAR-based localization and navigation system.