Integrated Bionic Polarized Vision/VINS for Goal-Directed Navigation and Homing in Unmanned Ground Vehicle

In this paper we present a bionic multi-sensor anavigation and control system for unmanned ground vehicles to complete the homing task. The system consists of the pixelated polarized sensor, a Micro Inertial Measurement Unit (MIMU), and a monocular camera. To compensate for the installation error, we provide a joint calibration method for multiple sensors. Utilizing the measurements of pixelated polarized vision sensor, we firstly propose an adaptive integrated method with the Visual-Inertial System. The integrated algorithm can not only solve the ambiguity problem of polarized orientation and reduce the cumulative error of the system, but also increase the navigation output rate and enhance the robustness of the system. We present a homevector-based strategy for the goal-directed navigation and control of the unmanned ground vehicles. When the external data link is interrupted, the unmanned vehicles can return to the starting point autonomously, which benefits for improving the survivability of the system. Finally, we design various experiments to verify the algorithm proposed in this paper. The experimental results of the calibration demonstrate that the RMSE of the orientation after calibration is only 0.014°. In the navigation and homing experiment, the RMSE of the position error is 0.64m, and the minimum homing error is only 0.49m (1.09% of the travelled distance). Finally, we discuss interesting insights gained with respect to future work in multi-sensor integration and robot control strategies.