Long-Term Exploration for Mobile Robots

移动机器人目前被用于室内、地下、水下、城市峡谷、森林和其他星球上具有挑战性的应用。尽管该领域最近取得了进展，但创建一个统一的长期探索框架（包括定位，地图和规划），可以在大规模，非结构化，三维环境中在线工作，无需事先地图并且仅使用车载传感器，这是移动机器人中的一个开放问题，这正是本提案的主题。无论是行星探索还是办公室邮件递送，我们可能对移动机器人执行对人类来说过于危险或枯燥的任务感兴趣。在很长一段时间里，机器人被认为世界是静态的，因此可以在任务执行之前建立一个地图，然后机器人使用它来操作。即使是同步定位和地图绘制（SLAM）等成功的技术，历史上也假设世界上的每个地方只有一个外观或“面孔”。我们现在知道，要让机器人长期服务，我们必须承认世界不是静态的，一个单一的位置可以有各种各样的外观（例如，不同的照明条件，变化的天气，物体移动）。我们寻求开发导航解决方案，使机器人能够在没有限制性假设的情况下在现实世界中操作。

Mobile robots are currently being used in challenging applications indoors, underground, underwater, in urban canyons, in forests, and on other planets. Despite recent advances in the field, creation of a unifying long-term exploration framework (comprised of localization, mapping, and planning) that can work online, in large-scale, unstructured, three-dimensional environments, without prior maps and using only onboard sensors, is an open problem in mobile robotics and is precisely the topic of this proposal.Whether for planetary exploration or office mail delivery, we may be interested in having a mobile robot carry out tasks that are too dangerous or dull for humans. For a long time in robotics, the world was considered to be static and thus a map could be built up in advance of task execution and then used by the robot to operate. Even successful techniques such as simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) have historically assumed that each place in the world has only a single appearance or `face'. We now know that to have robots operating in long-term service roles, we must acknowledge that the world is not static and that a single location can have a variety of appearances (e.g., different lighting conditions, varying weather, objects moving). We seek to develop navigation solutions that allow robots to operate in the real world without restrictive assumptions.