Unmanned Systems Technology 005 | Selex ES Falco UAV | Sense and avoid systems | RCV Engines DF70 | DSEI show report | Fuel cells | CUAV Expo, InterDrone and CUAV Show reports | SLAM

76 S imultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM) has been called a chicken-or-egg problem, but that particular conundrum has been solved – there were eggs for millions of years before chickens evolved. SLAM is a much harder problem though, because it requires an unmanned vehicle to enter an unfamiliar area, create a map from sensor data – and at the same time use it to find its way around that area without crashing into anything. Requiring a vehicle to proceed from the doubly uncertain state of not knowing where it is or where any landmarks are might seem perverse in an age of satellite navigation and digital maps, but autonomous systems that must operate underwater, indoors, underground or in environments otherwise deprived of navigation signals and reliable maps face exactly this problem. The term SLAM was first coined 20 years ago, at the 1995 International Symposium on Robotics Research, so the technology has had time to mature somewhat. Furthermore, because there are SLAM features in the latest version of iRobot’s Roomba autonomous vacuum cleaner, it may be said to have been partially domesticated, but there are still applications out there ‘in the wild’ that demand smarter, faster, more reliable and less computer-intensive algorithms than are yet available – and there is no Peter Donaldson reports on an emerging technique for enabling an unmanned system to find its way safely around an unknown area The way ahead Laser rangefinder returns and hexacopter track visualisation from a project to develop a UAV that can safely fly through an unknown indoor environment using SLAM (Courtesy University of Warwick) Dec 2015/Jan 2016 | Unmanned Systems Technology