A Robust and Rapidly Deployable Waypoint Navigation Architecture for Long-Duration Operations in GPS-Denied Environments

TL;DR

This paper presents a new multi-session waypoint navigation system for ground robots operating in GPS-denied environments, combining existing packages to enable rapid deployment and accurate long-term navigation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel architecture that integrates publicly available tools with a new package, allowing quick setup and reliable multi-session navigation in GPS-denied settings.

Findings

System takes only a few hours to set up from manual scan to autonomous navigation.

Enables accurate and repeatable multi-session waypoint navigation.

Addresses localization error accumulation across sessions.

Abstract

For long-duration operations in GPS-denied environments, accurate and repeatable waypoint navigation is an essential capability. While simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) works well for single-session operations, repeated, multi-session operations require robots to navigate to the same spot(s) accurately and precisely each and every time. Localization and navigation errors can build up from one session to the next if they are not accounted for. Localization using a global reference map works well, but there are no publicly available packages for quickly building maps and navigating with them. We propose a new architecture using a combination of two publicly available packages with a newly released package to create a fully functional multi-session navigation system for ground vehicles. The system takes just a few hours from the beginning of the first manual scan to perform autonomous waypoint navigation.