Anti-degenerated UWB-LiDAR Localization for Automatic Road Roller in Tunnel

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel UWB-LiDAR fusion localization method for tunnel environments, enhancing accuracy for automatic road rollers by addressing degeneration issues through optimization and feature extraction.

Contribution

It introduces a new localization approach combining UWB and LiDAR data with constraints and feature extraction, improving accuracy in tunnel conditions.

Findings

Outperforms existing localization methods in tunnel scenarios

Achieves higher positioning accuracy with UWB-LiDAR fusion

Demonstrates feasibility for real-world tunnel applications

Abstract

The automatic road roller, as a popular type of construction robot, has attracted much interest from both the industry and the research community in recent years. However, when it comes to tunnels where the degeneration issues are prone to happen, it is still a challenging problem to provide an accurate positioning result for the robot. In this paper, we aim to deal with this problem by fusing LiDAR and UWB measurements based on optimization. In the proposed localization method, the directions of non-degeneration will be constrained and the covariance of UWB reconstruction will be introduced to improve the accuracy of localization. Apart from these, a method that can extract the feature of the inner wall of tunnels to assist positioning is also presented in this paper. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, three experiments with real road roller were carried out and the results show that our method can achieve better performance than the existing methods and can be applied to automatic road roller working inside tunnels. Finally, we discuss the feasibility of deploying the system in real applications and make several recommendations.