Positioning and mapping for soldiers and first responders

It is a technical challenge to create a positioning system that is accurate enough in GPS-denied environments. Accurate positioning would increase the safety for smoke divers, other first responders and soldiers operating in unknown indoor environ­ments. It could be used for rapid search and rescue, to prevent fire­fighters and soldiers from getting lost, and to help a sector leader or incident commander keep track of the positions of firefighters or soldiers currently searching a building.

We develop a camera-based system, Chameleon, which is composed of two thermal infrared cameras, a stereo vision camera, and an inertial measurement unit. Chameleon is a system for simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), which navigates by tracking a number of landmarks (e.g., corners, lines or other points of interest in the camera images) as the camera moves through a scene. The system operates in both daylight and darkness, and can produce maps of visited environments.