6-DoF SLAM in Extremely Dark Environments Considering the Luminescent Properties of Phosphorescent Materials

This paper deals with 6-DOF (six-degrees of free- dom) SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) using general optical cameras in extremely dark environments, as- suming lunar and planetary environments. One of the challeng- ing points is to obtain traceable features in dark environments. To cope with such problems, we propose a new landmark design using phosphorescent materials that emit light without using any power source and its recognition method. We demonstrated that the performance of 6-DOF SLAM can be improved by our new SLAM framework with new landmark information in an uneven terrain where the odometry of a mobile robot is inaccurate.