Performance Analysis of an Autonomous Mobile Robot Mapping System for Outdoor Environments

As unmanned ground vehicles take on more and more intelligent tasks, determination of potential obstacles and accurate estimation of their position become critical for successful navigation and path planning. The performance analysis of obstacle mapping and unmanned vehicle positioning in outdoor environments is the subject of this paper. Recently, the National Institute of Standards and Technology´s (NIST) Intelligent Systems Division has been a part of the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency LAGR (Learning Applied to Ground Robots) Program. NIST´s objective for the LAGR Project is to insert learning algorithms into the modules that make up the NIST 4D/RCS (Four Dimensional/Real-Time Control System) standard reference model architecture which has been successfully applied to many intelligent systems. We detail world modeling techniques used in the 4D/RCS architecture and then analyze the high precision maps generated by the vehicle world modeling algorithms as compared to ground truth obtained from an independent differential GPS system operable throughout most of the NIST campus. This work has implications, not only for outdoor vehicles but also, for indoor automated guided vehicles where future systems will have more and more onboard intelligence requiring non-contact sensors to provide accurate vehicle and object positioning