Mapping disaster areas jointly: RFID-Coordinated SLAM by Hurnans and Robots

Abstract

We consider the problem of jointly performing SLAM by humans and robots in Urban Search And Rescue (USAR) scenarios. In this context, SLAM is a challenging task. First, places are hardly re-observable by vision techniques since visibility might be affected by smoke and fire. Second, loop-closure is cumbersome due to the fact that fire fighters will intentionally try to avoid performing loops when facing the reality of emergency response, e.g. while they are searching for victims. Furthermore, there might be places that are only accessible to robots, making it necessary to integrate humans and robots into one team for mapping the area after a disaster. In this paper, we introduce a method for jointly correcting individual trajectories of humans and robots by utilizing RFID technology for data association. Hereby the poses of humans and robots are tracked by PDR (Pedestrian Dead Reckoning) and slippage sensitive odometry, respectively. We conducted extensive experiments with a team of humans and robots within a semi-outdoor environment. Results from these experiments show that the introduced method allows to improve single trajectories based on the joint graph, even if they do not contain any loop.