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