RTISSLAM-3D: Full 6-DoF SLAM With an In-Air 3D Imaging Sonar

Key points

• Echolocating bats navigate dense forests using sonar alone, and in-air 3D imaging sonars now capture the entire frontal hemisphere with every pulse.1
• Sonar SLAM, however, has so far been planar: current systems estimate a 2D trajectory and discard the elevation information in the sonar images, an assumption that does not hold on rough and sloped terrain such as a forest floor.1
• A CFAR detector on the sphere reduces every sonar image to a sparse set of 3D detections, which we use for a 3D acoustic odometry that models the shape of the sonar beam, for place recognition with polar submap descriptors, and for the verification of loop closures by 3D registration, all combined in a 6-DoF pose graph with attitude factors.1
• We evaluated RTISSLAM-3D on a 545m drive through a forest, with a 3D lidar SLAM as reference.1

Sources (1)

• [1]RTISSLAM-3D: Full 6-DoF SLAM With an In-Air 3D Imaging Sonar
  arXiv (AI, ML, NLP, CV, robotics, multi-agent) · Oct 15, 06:47 PM

  In this paper, we introduce RTISSLAM-3D, a novel 6-DoF SLAM system for a wheeled robot that carries an in-air 3D imaging sonar, an IMU and wheel encoders.

  Echolocating bats navigate dense forests using sonar alone, and in-air 3D imaging sonars now capture the entire frontal hemisphere with every pulse.

Extractive summary: sentences quoted from the sources.