GPGM-SLAM: a Robust SLAM System for Unstructured Planetary Environments with Gaussian Process Gradient Maps

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) techniques play a key role towards long-term autonomy of mobile robots due to the ability to correct localization errors and produce consistent maps of an environment over time. Contrarily to urban or man-made environments, where the presence of unique objects and structures offer unique cues for localization, the appearance of unstructured natural environments is often ambiguous and self-similar, hindering the performances of loop closure detection. In this paper, we present an approach to improve the robustness of place recognition in the context of a submap-based stereo SLAM based on Gaussian Process Gradient Maps (GPGMaps). GPGMaps embed a continuous representation of the gradients of the local terrain elevation by means of Gaussian Process regression and Structured Kernel Interpolation, given solely noisy elevation measurements. We leverage the image-like structure of GPGMaps to detect loop closures using traditional visual features and Bag of Words. GPGMap matching is performed as an SE(2) alignment to establish loop closure constraints within a pose graph. We evaluate the proposed pipeline on a variety of datasets recorded on Mt. Etna, Sicily and in the Morocco desert, respectively Moon- and Mars-like environments, and we compare the localization performances with state-of-the-art approaches for visual SLAM and visual loop closure detection.

Multi-Modal Loop Closing in Unstructured Planetary Environments with Visually Enriched Submaps

Future planetary missions will rely on rovers that can autonomously explore and navigate in unstructured environments. An essential element is the ability to recognize places that were already visited or mapped. In this work we leverage the ability of stereo cameras to provide both visual and depth information, guiding the search and validation of loop closures from a multi-modal perspective. We propose to augment submaps that are created by aggregating stereo point clouds, with visual keyframes. Point clouds matches are found by comparing CSHOT descriptors and validated by clustering while visual matches are established by comparing keyframes using Bag-of-Words (BoW) and ORB descriptors. The relative transformations resulting from both keyframe and point cloud matches are then fused to provide pose constraints between submaps in our graph-based SLAM framework. Using the LRU rover, we performed several tests in both an indoor laboratory environment as well as a challenging planetary analog environment on Mount Etna, Italy. These environments consist of areas where either keyframes or point clouds alone fail to provide adequate matches, thus demonstrating the benefit of the proposed multi-modal approach.