Unmanned aerial vehicle orthogonal laser localization by Gaussian mixture model-based map representation

Localization is a core problem in mobile robot navigation. Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) costs much for an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). This research aims to design an orthogonal laser scan device for localization and to save computation costs. Based on disturbance analysis, residual influences on sensor state are quantitative, and they are related to uncertainty and sensitivity. This research applied the residual selection method to a UAV. The feature point detection utilises multi-scale and Gaussian model fitting techniques to guarantee true positives. The map is represented by Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM) with lower memory costs. The orthogonal laser scan device is composed and placed on a UAV for real-time three-dimensional localization, whose errors are at the centimeter level.