Vision-based particle filtering for quad-copter attitude estimation using multirate delayed measurements.

In this paper, the problem of attitude estimation of a quad-copter system equipped with a multi-rate camera and gyroscope sensors is addressed through extension of a sampling importance re-sampling (SIR) particle filter (PF). Attitude measurement sensors, such as cameras, usually suffer from a slow sampling rate and processing time delay compared to inertial sensors, such as gyroscopes. A discretized attitude kinematics in Euler angles is employed where the gyroscope noisy measurements are considered the model input, leading to a stochastic uncertain system model. Then, a multi-rate delayed PF is proposed so that when no camera measurement is available, the sampling part is performed only. In this case, the delayed camera measurements are used for weight computation and re-sampling. Finally, the efficiency of the proposed method is demonstrated through both numerical simulation and experimental work on the DJI Tello quad-copter system. The images captured by the camera are processed using the ORB feature extraction method and the homography method in Python-OpenCV, which is used to calculate the rotation matrix from the Tello's image frames.

Simultaneous localization and mapping in a multi-robot system in a dynamic environment with unknown initial correspondence.

A basic assumption in most approaches to simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is the static nature of the environment. In recent years, some research has been devoted to the field of SLAM in dynamic environments. However, most of the studies conducted in this field have implemented SLAM by removing and filtering the moving landmarks. Moreover, the use of several robots in large, complex, and dynamic environments can significantly improve performance on the localization and mapping task, which has attracted many researchers to this problem more recently. In multi-robot SLAM, the robots can cooperate in a decentralized manner without the need for a central processing center to obtain their positions and a more precise map of the environment. In this article, a new decentralized approach is presented for multi-robot SLAM problems in dynamic environments with unknown initial correspondence. The proposed method applies a modified Fast-SLAM method, which implements SLAM in a decentralized manner by considering moving landmarks in the environment. Due to the unknown initial correspondence of the robots, a geographical approach is embedded in the proposed algorithm to align and merge their maps. Data association is also embedded in the algorithm; this is performed using the measurement predictions in the SLAM process of each robot. Finally, simulation results are provided to demonstrate the performance of the proposed method.

Distributed observers for pose estimation in the presence of inertial sensory soft faults.

Distributed Particle-Kalman Filter based observers are designed in this paper for inertial sensors (gyroscope and accelerometer) soft faults (biases and drifts) and rigid body pose estimation. The observers fuse inertial sensors with Photogrammetric camera. Linear and angular accelerations as unknown inputs of velocity and attitude rate dynamics, respectively, along with sensory biases and drifts are modeled and augmented to the moving body state parameters. To reduce the complexity of the high dimensional and nonlinear model, the graph theoretic tearing technique (structural decomposition) is employed to decompose the system to smaller observable subsystems. Separate interacting observers are designed for the subsystems which are interacted through well-defined interfaces. Kalman Filters are employed for linear ones and a Modified Particle Filter for a nonlinear non-Gaussian subsystem which includes imperfect attitude rate dynamics is proposed. The main idea behind the proposed Modified Particle Filtering approach is to engage both system and measurement models in the particle generation process. Experimental results based on data from a 3D MEMS IMU and a 3D camera system are used to demonstrate the efficiency of the method.