The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences
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Citation
Articles | Volume XLII-3
https://doi.org/10.5194/isprs-archives-XLII-3-1439-2018
https://doi.org/10.5194/isprs-archives-XLII-3-1439-2018
30 Apr 2018
 | 30 Apr 2018

AN AUTONOMOUS GPS-DENIED UNMANNED VEHICLE PLATFORM BASED ON BINOCULAR VISION FOR PLANETARY EXPLORATION

M. Qin, X. Wan, Y. Y. Shao, and S. Y. Li

Keywords: Planetary Exploration, Unmanned Vehicle Platform, Vision-based Navigation, Feature Matching, 3D Reconstruction

Abstract. Vision-based navigation has become an attractive solution for autonomous navigation for planetary exploration. This paper presents our work of designing and building an autonomous vision-based GPS-denied unmanned vehicle and developing an ARFM (Adaptive Robust Feature Matching) based VO (Visual Odometry) software for its autonomous navigation. The hardware system is mainly composed of binocular stereo camera, a pan-and tilt, a master machine, a tracked chassis. And the ARFM-based VO software system contains four modules: camera calibration, ARFM-based 3D reconstruction, position and attitude calculation, BA (Bundle Adjustment) modules. Two VO experiments were carried out using both outdoor images from open dataset and indoor images captured by our vehicle, the results demonstrate that our vision-based unmanned vehicle is able to achieve autonomous localization and has the potential for future planetary exploration.