Active global localization based on localizability for mobile robots

Curve-Localizability-SVM Active Localization Research for Mobile Robots in Outdoor Environments

Working environment of mobile robots has gradually expanded from indoor structured scenes to outdoor scenes such as wild areas in recent years. The expansion of application scene, change of sensors and the diversity of working tasks bring greater challenges and higher demands to active localization for mobile robots. The efficiency and stability of traditional localization strategies in wild environments are significantly reduced. On the basis of considering features of the environment and the robot motion curved surface, this paper proposes a curve-localizability-SVM active localization algorithm. Firstly, we present a curve-localizability-index based on 3D observation model, and then based on this index, a curve-localizability-SVM path planning strategy and an improved active localization method are proposed. Obtained by setting the constraint space and objective function of the planning algorithm, where curve-localizability is the main constraint, the path helps improve the convergence speed and stability in complex environments of the active localization algorithm. Helped by SVM, the path is smoother and safer for large robots. The algorithm was tested by comparative experiments and analysis in real environment and robot platform, which verified the improvement of efficiency and stability of the new strategy.

MIM_SLAM: A Multi-Level ICP Matching Method for Mobile Robot in Large-Scale and Sparse Scenes

In large-scale and sparse scenes, such as farmland, orchards, mines, and substations, 3D simultaneous localization and mapping are challenging matters that need to address issues such as maintaining reliable data association for scarce environmental information and reducing the computational complexity of global optimization for large-scale scenes. To solve these problems, a real-time incremental simultaneous localization and mapping algorithm called MIM_SLAM is proposed in this paper. This algorithm is applied in mobile robots to build a map on a non-flat road with a 3D LiDAR sensor. MIM_SLAM’s main contribution is that multi-level ICP (Iterative Closest Point) matching is used to solve the data association problem, a Fisher information matrix is used to describe the uncertainty of the estimated pose, and these poses are optimized by the incremental optimization method, which can greatly reduce the computational cost. Then, a map with a high consistency will be established. The proposed algorithm has been evaluated in the real indoor and outdoor scenes as well as two substations and benchmarking dataset from KITTI with the characteristics of sparse and large-scale. Results show that the proposed algorithm has a high mapping accuracy and meets the real-time requirements.

Mobile robot self-localization in unstructured environments based on observation localizability estimation with low-cost laser range-finder and RGB-D sensors

When service robots work in human environments, unexpected and unknown moving people may deteriorate the convergence of robot localization or even cause failure localization if the environment is crowded. In this article, a multisensor observation localizability estimation method is proposed and implemented for supporting reliable robot localization in unstructured environments with low-cost sensors. The contribution of the approach is a strategy that combines noisy laser range-finder data and RGB-D data for estimating the dynamic localizability matrix in a probabilistic framework. By aligning two sensor frames, the unreliable part of the laser readings that hits unexpected moving people is fast extracted according to the output of a RGB-D-based human detector, so that the influence of unexpected moving people on laser observations can be explicitly factored out. The method is easy for implementation and is highly desirable to ensure robustness and real-time performance for long-term operation in populated environments. Comparative experiments are conducted and the results confirm the effectiveness and reliability of the proposed method in improving the localization accuracy and reliability in dynamic environments.