Sensors (Jan 2023)
Semantic-Structure-Aware Multi-Level Information Fusion for Robust Global Orientation Optimization of Autonomous Mobile Robots
Abstract
Multi-camera-based simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) has been widely applied in various mobile robots under uncertain or unknown environments to accomplish tasks autonomously. However, the conventional purely data-driven feature extraction methods cannot utilize the rich semantic information in the environment, which leads to the performance of the SLAM system being susceptible to various interferences. In this work, we present a semantic-aware multi-level information fusion scheme for robust global orientation estimation. Specifically, a visual semantic perception system based on the synthesized surround view image is proposed for the multi-eye surround vision system widely used in mobile robots, which is used to obtain the visual semantic information required for SLAM tasks. The original multi-eye image was first transformed to the synthesized surround view image, and the passable space was extracted with the help of the semantic segmentation network model as a mask for feature extraction; moreover, the hybrid edge information was extracted to effectively eliminate the distorted edges by further using the distortion characteristics of the reverse perspective projection process. Then, the hybrid semantic information was used for robust global orientation estimation; thus, better localization performance was obtained. The experiments on an intelligent vehicle, which was used for automated valet parking both in indoor and outdoor scenes, showed that the proposed hybrid multi-level information fusion method achieved at least a 10-percent improvement in comparison with other edge segmentation methods, the average orientation estimation error being between 1 and 2 degrees, much smaller than other methods, and the trajectory drift value of the proposed method was much smaller than that of other methods.
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