Reliable Visual Exploration System with Fault Tolerance Structure

Reliability of visual tracking and mapping is a challenging problem in robotics research, and it limits the promotion of vision-based mobile robot applications to a great extent. In this paper, we propose to improve the reliability of visual exploration in terms of its fault tolerance. Three modules are involved in our visual exploration system: visual localization and mapping, active controller and termination condition. High maintainability of mapping is obtained by the submap-based visual mapping module, persistent driving is achieved by a semantic segmentation based active controller, and robustness of re-localization is guaranteed by a novel completeness evaluation method in the termination condition. All the modules are integrated tightly for maintaining mapping and improving visual tracking. The system is verified with simulations and real world experiments, and all the solutions to fault tolerance are verified to overcome the failure conditions of visual tracking and mapping.