Autonomous Positioning for Mobile Vehicles Based on Visual‐Inertial Fusion in Challenging Dark Roadway Scenes

ABSTRACT Accurate positioning for autonomous driven underground mining vehicles (UMVs) and coal mine robots (CMRs) is indeed one of the cores in the intelligentization of coal mining. Completely different from positioning on the ground and in parking scenes, there will be great difficulties in realizing the accurate active positioning for UMVs shuttled in dark and narrow roadways. We propose an effective visual and inertial fusion positioning method for autonomous CMRs and roadheaders in challenging roadway scenarios based on the odometer‐aided inertial navigation system and visual pose estimation system. Velocity information of the odometer is adapted to restrain the error accumulation of inertial positioning based on a Kalman filter. The hybrid visual feature detection algorithm is put forward to improve the accuracy and robustness of visual observation information in a dark environment. Autonomous experiments for CMRs and roadheaders are separately performed in the narrow roadway and dark passageway to demonstrate the applicability of our localization method. The proposed approach outperforms the subsystems and existing methods in accuracy and has outstanding stability.