Inertial Navigation and Mapping for Autonomous Vehicles

Sammanfattning: Navigation and mapping in unknown environments is an important building block for increased autonomy of unmanned vehicles, since external positioning systems can be susceptible to interference or simply being inaccessible. Navigation and mapping require signal processing of vehicle sensor data to estimate motion relative to the surrounding environment and to simultaneously estimate various properties of the surrounding environment. Physical models of sensors, vehicle motion and external influences are used in conjunction with statistically motivated methods to solve these problems. This thesis mainly addresses three navigation and mapping problems which are described below.We study how a vessel with known magnetic signature and a sensor network with magnetometers can be used to determine the sensor positions and simultaneously determine the vessel's route in an extended Kalman filter (EKF). This is a so-called simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM) problem with a reversed measurement relationship.Previously determined hydrodynamic models for a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) are used together with the vessel's sensors to improve the navigation performance using an EKF. Data from sea trials is used to evaluate the system and the results show that especially the linear velocity relative to the water can be accurately determined.The third problem addressed is SLAM with inertial sensors, accelerometers and gyroscopes, and an optical camera contained in a single sensor unit. This problem spans over three publications.We study how a SLAM estimate, consisting of a point cloud map, the sensor unit's three dimensional trajectory and speed as well as its orientation, can be improved by solving a nonlinear least-squares (NLS) problem. NLS minimisation of the predicted motion error and the predicted point cloud coordinates given all camera measurements is initialised using EKF-SLAM.We show how NLS-SLAM can be initialised as a sequence of almost uncoupled problems with simple and often linear solutions. It also scales much better to larger data sets than EKF-SLAM. The results obtained using NLS-SLAM are significantly better using the proposed initialisation method than if started from arbitrary points. A SLAM formulation using the expectation maximisation (EM) algorithm is proposed. EM splits the original problem into two simpler problems and solves them iteratively. Here the platform motion is one problem and the landmark map is the other. The first problem is solved using an extended Rauch-Tung-Striebel smoother while the second problem is solved with a quasi-Newton method. The results using EM-SLAM are better than NLS-SLAM both in terms of accuracy and complexity.