Perception System Design for Low-Cost Commercial Ground Robots: Sensor Configurations, Calibration, Localization and Mapping

For commercially successful ground robots, high degree of autonomy, low manufacturing and maintenance cost, as well as minimized deployment limitations in different environments are essential attributes. To deliver an `anywhere deployable' product, it is impractical to rely on one single sensor or one single piece of algorithm to overcome all related challenges. Instead, the entire robotic system should be dedicated designed, including the choices of sensors, processors, algorithm integration for various functionality, and so on. This paper presents our design of perception system for commercial ground robots, which is able to operate in most common environments. The designed system is equipped with low-cost sensors and processors. The first key contribution of this paper is the design of the robotic sensory system, which includes a monocular camera, a 2D laser range finder (LRF), wheel encoders, and an inertial measurement unit (IMU). Our sensory system can be built at a cost of as low as 100. Furthermore, the selected sensors provide complementary characteristics for perception of both robot ego-motion and its surrounding environments, which are the prerequisites for `anywhere' deployment. The second key contribution of this paper is that a complete set of technologies is proposed based on our sensor systems, including sensor calibration (factory calibration and online calibration), localization (environmental exploring and re-localization), as well as mapping. The proposed methodology includes both efficient engineering implementation and theoretical novelty for high performance systems. Experimental results from our robotic testing platform and off-the-shelf commercial robots are presented. These results demonstrate that the proposed system can be deployed in various environmental conditions without performance compromise.