Boundary Wire Mapping on Autonomous Lawn Mowers

Abstract

Currently, the service robot market mainly consists of floor cleaning and lawn mowing robots. While some cleaning robots already feature SLAM technology for the constrained indoor application, autonomous lawn mowers typically use an electric wire for boundary definition and homing towards to charging station. An intermediate step towards SLAM for mowers is mapping of the boundary wire. In this work, we analyze three types of approaches for estimating the boundary of the working area of an autonomous mower: GNSS, visual odometry, and wheel-yaw odometry. We extended the latter with orientation loop closure, which gives the best overall result in estimating the metric shape of the boundary.