Registration of Range Data from Unmanned Aerial and Ground Vehicles

Published

October 1, 2003

Author(s)

Anthony J. Downs, Rajmohan Madhavan, Tsai Hong Hong

Abstract

In the research reported in this paper, we propose to overcome the unavailability of GPS using combined information obtained froma scanning LADARrangefinder on an Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) and a LADAR mounted on an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) that flies over the terrain being traversed. The approach to estimate and update the position of the UGV involves registering range data from the two LADARs using a combination of a feature-based registration method and a modifiedversion of the well-known Iterative Closest Point(ICP) algorithm. Registration of range data thus guarantees an estimate of the vehicle s position even when only one of the vehicles has GPS information. Additionally, such registration over time (i.e., from sample to sample), enables position information to be maintained even whenboth vehicles can no longer maintain GPS contact. The approach has been validated by conducting systematic experiments on complex real-world data.

Proceedings Title

Applied Image Patter Recognition Workshop (AIPR 2003) | 32nd | Proceedings of the 32nd applied Image Pattern Recognition Workshop (AIPR 2003): Image Data Fusion | IEEE

Conference Dates

October 15-17, 2003

Conference Title

Applied Imagery Pattern Recognition (AIPR) 2003 workshop

Pub Type

Conferences

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Keywords

Feature-based Registration, GPS, ICP, LADAR, Position Estimation, UAV, UGV

Citation

Downs, A. , Madhavan, R. and , T. (2003), Registration of Range Data from Unmanned Aerial and Ground Vehicles, Applied Image Patter Recognition Workshop (AIPR 2003) | 32nd | Proceedings of the 32nd applied Image Pattern Recognition Workshop (AIPR 2003): Image Data Fusion | IEEE, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=823471 (Accessed October 7, 2025)