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arXiv · 2205.13135

LAMP 2.0: A Robust Multi-Robot SLAM System for Operation in Challenging Large-Scale Underground Environments

Yun Chang·Kamak Ebadi·Christopher E. Denniston·Muhammad Fadhil Ginting·Antoni Rosinol·Andrzej Reinke·Matteo Palieri·Jingnan Shi·Arghya Chatterjee·Benjamin Morrell·Ali-akbar Agha-mohammadi·Luca Carlone
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Abstract

Search and rescue with a team of heterogeneous mobile robots in unknown and large-scale underground environments requires high-precision localization and mapping. This crucial requirement is faced with many challenges in complex and perceptually-degraded subterranean environments, as the onboard perception system is required to operate in off-nominal conditions (poor visibility due to darkness and dust, rugged and muddy terrain, and the presence of self-similar and ambiguous scenes). In a disaster response scenario and in the absence of prior information about the environment, robots must rely on noisy sensor data and perform Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) to build a 3D map of the environment and localize themselves and potential survivors. To that end, this paper reports on a multi-robot SLAM system developed by team CoSTAR in the context of the DARPA Subterranean Challenge. We extend our previous work, LAMP, by incorporating a single-robot front-end interface that is adaptable to different odometry sources and lidar configurations, a scalable multi-robot front-end to support inter- and intra-robot loop closure detection for large scale environments and multi-robot teams, and a robust back-end equipped with an outlier-resilient pose graph optimization based on Graduated Non-Convexity. We provide a detailed ablation study on the multi-robot front-end and back-end, and assess the overall system performance in challenging real-world datasets collected across mines, power plants, and caves in the United States. We also release our multi-robot back-end datasets (and the corresponding ground truth), which can serve as challenging benchmarks for large-scale underground SLAM.

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Yun Chang, Kamak Ebadi, Christopher E. Denniston, Muhammad Fadhil Ginting, Antoni Rosinol, Andrzej Reinke, Matteo Palieri, Jingnan Shi, Arghya Chatterjee, Benjamin Morrell, Ali-akbar Agha-mohammadi, Luca Carlone. 2022-07-09. LAMP 2.0: A Robust Multi-Robot SLAM System for Operation in Challenging Large-Scale Underground Environments. https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.13135

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