Accurate Real-Time Localization Estimation in Underground Mine Environments Based on a Distance-Weight Map (DWM)

The precise localization of an underground mine environment is key to achieving unmanned and intelligent underground mining. However, in an underground environment, GPS is unavailable, there are variable and often poor lighting conditions, there is visual aliasing in long tunnels, and the occurrence of airborne dust and water, presenting great difficulty for localization. We demonstrate a high-precision, real-time, without-infrastructure underground localization method based on 3D LIDAR. The underground mine environment map was constructed based on GICP-SLAM, and inverse distance weighting (IDW) was first proposed to implement error correction based on point cloud mapping called a distance-weight map (DWM). The map was used for the localization of the underground mine environment for the first time. The approach combines point cloud frames matching and DWM matching in an unscented Kalman filter fusion process. Finally, the localization method was tested in four underground scenes, where a spatial localization error of 4 cm and 60 ms processing time per frame were obtained. We also analyze the impact of the initial pose and point cloud segmentation with respect to localization accuracy. The results showed that this new algorithm can realize low-drift, real-time localization in an underground mine environment.