Real-time hierarchical stereo Visual SLAM in large-scale environments

  • Authors:

  • David Schleicher;Luis M. Bergasa;Manuel Ocaña;Rafael Barea;Elena López

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Electronics, University of Alcala, Alcalá de Henares, 28805 Madrid, Spain;Department of Electronics, University of Alcala, Alcalá de Henares, 28805 Madrid, Spain;Department of Electronics, University of Alcala, Alcalá de Henares, 28805 Madrid, Spain;Department of Electronics, University of Alcala, Alcalá de Henares, 28805 Madrid, Spain;Department of Electronics, University of Alcala, Alcalá de Henares, 28805 Madrid, Spain

  • Venue:
  • Robotics and Autonomous Systems
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

In this paper we present a new real-time hierarchical (topological/metric) Visual SLAM system focusing on the localization of a vehicle in large-scale outdoor urban environments. It is exclusively based on the visual information provided by a cheap wide-angle stereo camera. Our approach divides the whole map into local sub-maps identified by the so-called fingerprints (vehicle poses). At the sub-map level (low level SLAM), 3D sequential mapping of natural landmarks and the robot location/orientation are obtained using a top-down Bayesian method to model the dynamic behavior. A higher topological level (high level SLAM) based on fingerprints has been added to reduce the global accumulated drift, keeping real-time constraints. Using this hierarchical strategy, we keep the local consistency of the metric sub-maps, by mean of the EKF, and global consistency by using the topological map and the MultiLevel Relaxation (MLR) algorithm. Some experimental results for different large-scale outdoor environments are presented, showing an almost constant processing time.