DRACo-SLAM: Distributed Robust Acoustic Communication-efficient SLAM for Imaging Sonar Equipped Underwater Robot Teams

John McConnell, Yewei Huang, Paul Szenher, Ivana Collado-Gonzalez, Brendan Englot

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

6 Scopus citations

Abstract

An essential task for a multi-robot system is generating a common understanding of the environment and relative poses between robots. Cooperative tasks can be executed only when a vehicle has knowledge of its own state and the states of the team members. However, this has primarily been achieved with direct rendezvous between underwater robots, via inter-robot ranging. We propose a novel distributed multi-robot simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) framework for underwater robots using imaging sonar-based perception. By passing only scene descriptors between robots, we do not need to pass raw sensor data unless there is a likelihood of inter-robot loop closure. We utilize pairwise consistent measurement set maximization (PCM), making our system robust to erroneous loop closures. The functionality of our system is demonstrated using two real-world datasets, one with three robots and another with two robots. We show that our system effectively estimates the trajectories of the multi-robot system and keeps the bandwidth requirements of inter-robot communication low. To our knowledge, this paper describes the first instance of multi-robot SLAM using real imaging sonar data (which we implement offline, using simulated communication). Code link: https://github.com/jake3991/DRACo-SLAM.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationIEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IROS 2022
Pages8457-8464
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)9781665479271
DOIs
StatePublished - 2022
Event2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IROS 2022 - Kyoto, Japan
Duration: 23 Oct 202227 Oct 2022

Publication series

NameIEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems
Volume2022-October
ISSN (Print)2153-0858
ISSN (Electronic)2153-0866

Conference

Conference2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IROS 2022
Country/TerritoryJapan
CityKyoto
Period23/10/2227/10/22

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