IPS – A SYSTEM FOR REAL-TIME NAVIGATION AND 3D MODELING

Abstract. fdaReliable navigation and 3D modeling is a necessary requirement for any autonomous system in real world scenarios. German Aerospace Center (DLR) developed a system providing precise information about local position and orientation of a mobile platform as well as three-dimensional information about its environment in real-time. This system, called Integral Positioning System (IPS) can be applied for indoor environments and outdoor environments. To achieve high precision, reliability, integrity and availability a multi-sensor approach was chosen. The important role of sensor data synchronization, system calibration and spatial referencing is emphasized because the data from several sensors has to be fused using a Kalman filter. A hardware operating system (HW-OS) is presented, that facilitates the low-level integration of different interfaces. The benefit of this approach is an increased precision of synchronization at the expense of additional engineering costs. It will be shown that the additional effort is leveraged by the new design concept since the HW-OS methodology allows a proven, flexible and fast design process, a high re-usability of common components and consequently a higher reliability within the low-level sensor fusion. Another main focus of the paper is on IPS software. The DLR developed, implemented and tested a flexible and extensible software concept for data grabbing, efficient data handling, data preprocessing (e.g. image rectification) being essential for thematic data processing. Standard outputs of IPS are a trajectory of the moving platform and a high density 3D point cloud of the current environment. This information is provided in real-time. Based on these results, information processing on more abstract levels can be executed.