Learning to See the Wood for the Trees: Deep Laser Localization in Urban and Natural Environments on a CPU

Localization in challenging, natural environments, such as forests or woodlands, is an important capability for many applications from guiding a robot navigating along a forest trail to monitoring vegetation growth with handheld sensors. In this letter, we explore laser-based localization in both urban and natural environments, which is suitable for online applications. We propose a deep learning approach capable of learning meaningful descriptors directly from three-dimensional point clouds by comparing triplets (anchor, positive, and negative examples). The approach learns a feature space representation for a set of segmented point clouds that are matched between a current and previous observations. Our learning method is tailored toward loop closure detection resulting in a small model that can be deployed using only a CPU. The proposed learning method would allow the full pipeline to run on robots with limited computational payloads, such as drones, quadrupeds, or Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs).