Random Set Approach to Distributed Multivehicle SLAM

This paper deals with the simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) problem for autonomous vehicles or mobile robots. More specifically, a multi-vehicle scenario is considered wherein a team of vehicles explore the scene of interest in order to cooperatively construct the map of the environment by locally updating and exchanging map information in a neighbor wise fashion. A random-set approach is undertaken by regarding the map as a random finite set (RFS) and updating the first-order moment, called probability hypothesis density (PHD), of its multi-object density. Consensus on PHDs is adopted in order to spread the map information through the team of vehicles also taking into account the different and time-varying fields of view (FoVs) of the team members. The developed algorithm represents - to the best of the authors' knowledge - the first attempt to solve in a fully decentralized way the multi-vehicle SLAM problem within the RFS framework. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is tested by means of simulation experiments. (C) 2017, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.