Modelling and Run-Time Control of Localization System for Resource-Constrained Devices

Sammanfattning: As resource-constrained autonomous vehicles are used for more and more applications, their ability to achieve the lowest possible localization error without expending more power than needed is crucial. Despite this, the parameter settings of the localization systems, both for the platform and the application, are often set arbitrarily. In this thesis, we propose a model-based controller that adapts the parameters of the localization system during run-time by observing conditions in the environment. The test-bed used for experiments consists of maplab, a visual-inertial localization framework, that we execute on the Nvdia Jetson AGX platform. The results show that the linear velocity is the single most important environmental attribute to base the decision of when to update the parameters upon. We also found that while it was not possible to find a direct connection between certain parameters and environmental conditions, a connection could be found between sets of configuration parameters and conditions. Based on these conclusions, we compare model-based controller setups based on three different models: Finite Impulse Response (FIR), AutoRegressive eXogenous input (ARX) and Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP). The FIR-based controller performed the best. This FIR-based controller is able to select configurations at the appropriate times to keep the error lower than it would be to randomly guess which set of configuration parameters is best. The proposed solution requires offline profiling before it can be implemented on new localization systems, but it can help to reduce the error and power consumption and thus enable more uses of resource-constrained devices.