The SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) problematic is widely studied from years at LAAS. The aimed application is the development of a helping rolling system for planes on airports. This system has to work under any visibility and weather conditions ("SART" project, funding by DGE, with FLIR Systems, Thalès and Latecoère). During some weather conditions (fog, rain, darkness), one only visible camera is not enough to complete this task of SLAM. Firstly, in this thesis, we will study what an infrared camera can bring to SLAM problematic, compared to a visible camera, particularly during hard visible conditions. Secondly, we will focus on using Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) and GPS into SLAM algorithm, IMU helping on movement prediction, and GPS helping on SLAM correction step. Finally, we will fit in this SLAM algorithm pseudo-observations coming from matching between points retrieved from images, and lines coming from map database. The main objective of the whole system is to localize the vehicle at one meter. These algorithms aimed to work on a FPGA with a low-power processor (400MHz), a co-design between the hardware (processing images on the fly) and the software (embedding an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) for the SLAM), has to be realized in order to guarantee a real-time application at 30 Hz. These algorithms will be experimented on LAAS robots, then embedded on different boards (Virtex 5, Raspberry Pi, PandaBoard...) for performances evaluation.
