Cooperative SLAM of an Autonomous Indoor Quadrotor Flying Together with an Autonomous Ground Robot

This paper presents a three-dimensional (3D) cooperative Simultaneous-Location-and-Mapping (SLAM) method for a quadrotor flying together with a differential driving autonomous ground robot (AGR) in indoor environments. An ORB (Oriented Fast and Rotated BRIEF)-SLAM approach is used to find a 3D map and poses of individual quadrotor simultaneously, and the particle-filter SLAM approach is used to construct 2D map of the global environment for the AGR. A more accurate 3D pose method for the quadrotor is proposed with the assistance of AGR. The two SLAM approaches and quadrotor pose estimation method are operated under the robotic operation system (ROS) environment. One experiment is conducted to show the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method. Keywords: Cooperative SLAM, ORB (Oriented Fast and Rotated BRIEF)-SLAM, particle-filter SLAM, ROS, mobile multi-robots.