Multi-Cam ARM-SLAM: Robust Multi-Modal State Estimation Using Truncated Signed Distance Functions for Mobile Rescue Robots

Abstract

To be able to perform manipulation tasks within an unknown environment, rescue robots require a detailed model of their surroundings, which is often generated using registered depth images as an input. However, erroneous camera registrations due to noisy motor encoder readings, a faulty kinematic model or other error sources can drastically reduce the model quality. Most existing approaches register the pose of a free-floating single camera without considering constraints by the kinematic robot configuration. In contrast, ARM-SLAM [1] performs dense localization and mapping in the configuration space of the robot arm, implicitly tracking the pose of a single camera and creating a volumetric model. However, using a single camera only allows to cover a small field of view and can only constrain up to six degrees of freedom. Therefore, we propose the Multi-Cam ARM-SLAM (MC-ARM-SLAM) framework, which fuses information of multiple depth cameras mounted on the robot into a joint model. The use of multiple cameras allows to also estimate the motion of the robot base that is modeled as a virtual kinematic chain additionally to the motion of the arm. Furthermore, we use a robust bivariate error formulation, which helps to boost the accuracy of the method and mitigates the influence of outliers. The proposed method is extensively evaluated in simulation and on a real rescue robot. It is shown that the method is able to correct errors in the motor encoders and the kinematic model and outperforms the base version of ARM-SLAM.