Portrait of Isabel Lougheed is unavailable

Isabel Lougheed

isabel.lougheed@mila.quebec
Master's Research - McGill University
Supervisor
James Richard Forbes
Research Topics
Autonomous Robotics Navigation
Robotics
Sonar Imagery
GitHub

Publications

Range-Aided SLAM Initialization Exploiting Accurate Heading Information
Isabel Lougheed
James Richard Forbes
This paper presents a novel initialization method for range-aided simultaneous localization and mapping (RA-SLAM). The general SLAM problem … (see more)has a well-known separable structure where landmark and robot positions can be solved for in a linear fashion given known robot headings. This paper considers the case where highly accurate heading information is available, which is typical of autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) navigation, to solve for the range transponder and robot positions. The proposed approach consists of two steps. First, using a generalized trust region subproblem (GTRS), the positions of the transponders relative to the AUV are solved for given the nonlinear range measurements. Second, the relative transponder positions and the known heading of the AUV are used to estimate the transponder and AUV positions by solving a linear least-squares problem. These transponder and AUV position estimates, combined with the highly accurate heading information, provide a reliable initialization method for the general nonlinear RA-SLAM problem. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is tested on a real-world AUV dataset where long baseline (LBL) range measurements are provided in concert with highly accurate heading information provided by an inertial navigation system (INS).
2026-09-20
arXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org