Sensor Management in 2D Lidar-Based Underground Positioning

Lidar-based positioning in a 2D map is analyzed as a method to provide a robust, high accuracy, and infrastructure-free positioning system required by the automation development in underground mining. Expressions are derived that highlight separate information contributions to the obtained position accuracy. This is used to develop two new methods that efficiently select which subset of available lidar rays to use to reduce the computational complexity and allow for online processing with minimal loss of accuracy. The results are verified in simulations of a mid-articulated underground loader in a mine. The methods are shown to be able to reduce the number of rays needed without considerably affecting the performance, and to be competitive with currently used methods. Furthermore, simulations highlight the effects of errors in the map and other map properties, and how imperfect maps degrades the performance of different selection strategies.