Multisensor on-the-fly localization using laser and vision

In this paper a multisensor setup for localization consisting of a 360 degree laser range finder and a monocular vision system is presented. Its practicability under conditions of continuous localization during motion in real-time (referred to as on-the-fly localization) is investigated in largescale experiments. The features in use are infinite horizontal lines for the laser and vertical lines for the camera providing an extremely compact environment representation. They are extracted using physically well-grounded models for all sensors and passed to the Kalman filter for fusion and position estimation. Very high localization precision is obtained in general. The vision information has been found to further increase this precision, particular in the orientation, already with a moderate number of matched features. The results were obtained with a fully autonomous system where extensive tests with an overall length of more than 1.4 km and 9,500 localization cycles have been conducted. Furthermore, general aspects of multisensor on-the-fly localization are discussed.