Visual Sensors for SLAM

EMILY Search and Rescue Unmanned Surface Vehicle EMergency Integrated Lifesaving lanyard, EMILY, is a Unmanned Surface Vehicle, USV, that has served as a lifeguard to about 300 Syrians on Lesbos the Greek Island according to Office of Naval Research, ONR (McCaney, 2016). More than 260 devices are in use by United States, South Korea, Indonesia, Singapore, The United Kingdom, France, Mongolia, Brazil, Mexico, and Greece (McCaney, 2016). EMILY is a collaboration from ONR, Tony Mulligan and Navy’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) (McCaney, 2016), the lifeguard buoy is produced and distributed by Hydronalix (Pamela, 2017). Duluth Fire department has tested the USV at Lake Superior where the 25lb vehicle was able to pull two firefighters out of Lake Superior (Pamela, 2017). The payload according to the EMILY pamphlet consists of a Type 1 life jacket, a white water helmet, 2 VHF water proof radios, and a headlight. The USV is five and a half feet long that can operate up ...

What is SLAM and why is needed it? Simultaneous Localization And Mapping, SLAM , is the action of navigating an environment while mapping it at the same time to create a local positioning system in which a robot can position itself in reference to its surroundings (Musba, 2013).  Why use a complicated system when GPS is available? There are many situations where GPS is not a viable option like indoors, or underwater. Focusing on the indoors application, a system can use a camera to detect, avoid and map obstacles by using SLAM (Egodagamage, 2017). While SLAM is not necessary as a technique to get an autonomous system to navigate without crashing, it is a necessary for more complex problems like remembering where an object of interest is.  SLAM allows the unmanned system to create a map by referencing the observed obstacles, and surroundings and recording the data with reference to the system. As the system moves through an area more data is available creating a bette...