A unified visual graph-based approach to navigation for wheeled mobile robots

Abstract

The emergence of affordable 3D cameras in recent years has led to an increased interest in camera-based navigation solutions. Yet, while there have been significant efforts in the field of visual simultaneous localization and mapping (VSLAM), a complete navigation package that could rival popular laser-based solutions is not available. In this paper, we will therefore introduce visual solutions to SLAM, localization, and path planning in a unified graph-based framework with the main target of wheeled robots in industrial applications. Novel solutions will be introduced in the fields of place recognition and loop closing as well as localization. Our algorithms will be built for the Robot Operating System (ROS) and fully replace the popular gmapping and AMCL algorithms.