Vehicle Pose Estimation and SONAR Sensor Based Mapping

In carrying out simultaneous localization and mapping, a mobile vehicle is used to simultaneously estimate its position and build a map of the environment. The long-term goal of this work is to build an autonomous inspection mobile vehicle for oil storage tanks and pipelines. The harsh environmental conditions in storage tanks and pipelines limit the types of feature extraction sensors and vehicle pose estimation sensors that one can use. Here, a SOund Navigation And Ranging (SONAR) sensor will be used for feature extraction, and a gyroscope and an encoder will be used for vehicle pose estimation. The integration of these sensors (SONAR, encoder, and gyroscope) will be discussed in this paper, along with the use of a recently developed algorithm fusion for SONAR sensors. The integration of the sensors represents a step towards implementation of concurrent localization and mapping progress in harsh environments.