TERRESTRIAL MOBILE MAPPING BASED ON A MICROWAVE RADAR SENSOR. APPLICATION TO THE LOCALIZATION OF MOBILE ROBOTS

Abstract

Mobile robotics applications in outdoor environments now use intensively Global Positioning System (GPS). For localization or navigation operations, GPS has become an essential tool due to its ease of use, its precision, and its worldwide accessibility. The increase of autonomy level in mobile robotics implies a robust centimeter-level positioning, but the presence of natural (trees, mountains) or man-made obstacles (buildings) can degrade or prevent GPS signals reception. We present in this paper a solution for robots localization based on PELICAN microwave radar. PELICAN radar provides each second a panoramic image of the surrounding environment. These images are concatenated through a Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) algorithm in order to build global maps of the traveled environments. The proposed solution computes the position and orientation of the robot through a real-time 3D matching between the current radar image and a pre-existing radar map constructed during an exploratory phase.