We present the localization approach for Astrobee, a new free-flying robot designed to navigate autonomously on the International Space Station (ISS). Astrobee will accommodate a variety of payloads and enable guest scientists to run experiments in zero-g, as well as assist astronauts and ground controllers. Astrobee will replace the SPHERES robots which currently operate on the ISS, whose use of fixed ultrasonic beacons for localization limits them to work in a 2 meter cube. Astrobee localizes with monocular vision and an IMU, without any environmental modifications. Visual features detected on a pre-built map, optical flow information, and IMU readings are all integrated into an extended Kalman filter (EKF) to estimate the robot pose. We introduce several modifications to the filter to make it more robust to noise, and extensively evaluate the localization algorithm.
Localization from Visual Landmarks on a Free-Flying Robot
International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROCS) ; 2016 ; Daejeon, Korea, Republic of
2016-10-09
Conference paper
No indication
English
Visual Landmarks Detection and Recognition for Mobile Robot Navigation
British Library Conference Proceedings | 2003
|Intelligent, Free-Flying Robot
NTIS | 1989
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