UWB/LiDAR fusion for cooperative range-only SLAM

• Main Authors: Song, Yang, Guan, Mingyang, Tay, Wee Peng, Law, Choi Look, Wen, Changyun
• Other Authors: School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
• Format: Conference or Workshop Item
• Language: English
• Published: 2020
• Subjects: Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering::Control and instrumentation::Robotics; Cooperative Sensor Network; 2D LiDAR Sensor
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/141856
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

We equip an ultra-wideband (UWB) node and a 2D LiDAR sensor a.k.a. 2D laser rangefinder on a mobile robot, and place UWB beacon nodes at unknown locations in an unknown environment. All UWB nodes can do ranging with each other thus forming a cooperative sensor network. We propose to fuse the peer-to-peer ranges measured between UWB nodes and laser scanning information, i.e., range measured between robot and nearby objects/obstacles, for simultaneous localization of the robot, all UWB beacons and LiDAR mapping. The fusion is inspired by two facts: 1) LiDAR may improve UWB-only localization accuracy as it gives a more precise and comprehensive picture of the surrounding environment; 2) on the other hand, UWB ranging measurements may remove the error accumulated in the LiDAR-based SLAM algorithm. Our experiments demonstrate that UWB/LiDAR fusion enables drift-free SLAM in real-time based on ranging measurements only.