Lab meeting Jan. 23, 2013 (Gene): Fully Distributed Scalable Smoothing and Mapping with Robust Multi-robot Data Association (IEEE 2012)

Title: Fully Distributed Scalable Smoothing and Mapping with Robust Multi-robot Data Association (IEEE 2012)
Authors: Alexander Chunningham, Kai M. Wurm, Wolfarm Burgard, and Frank Dellaert

Abstract:


In this paper we focus on the multi-robot perception problem, and present an experimentally validated end-to-end multi-robot mapping framework, enabling individual robots in a team to see beyond their individual sensor horizons. The inference part of our system is the DDF-SAM algorithm [1], which provides a decentralized communication and inference scheme, but did not address the crucial issue of data association.

One key contribution is a novel, RANSAC-based, approach for performing the between-robot data associations and initialization of relative frames of reference. We demonstrate this system with both data collected from real robot experiments, as well as in a large scale simulated experiment demonstrating the scalability of the proposed approach.

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