J.-S. Gutmann, W. Burgard, D. Fox, and K. Konolige

An experimental comparison of localization methods

Proc. of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS'98)


 

Abstract

Localization is the process of updating the pose of a robot in an environment, based on sensor readings.  In this experimental study, we compare two recentmethods for localization of indoor mobile robots: Markov localization, whichuses a probability distribution across a grid of robot poses; and scan matching,which uses Kalman filtering techniques based on matching sensor scans.  Boththese techniques are dense matching methods, that is, they match dense setsof environment features to an a priori map.  To arrive at results for arangeof situations, we utilize several different types ofenvironments, and addnoise to both the dead-reckoning and the sensors.  Analysis shows that, roughly,the scan-matching techniques are more efficient and accurate, but Markov localizationis better able to cope with large amounts of noise.  These results suggesthybrid methods that are efficient, accurate and robust to noise.

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Bibtex

@INPROCEEDINGS{Gut98Exp,
  AUTHOR    = {Gutmann, J.-S. and Burgard, W. and Fox, D. and Konolige, K.},
  TITLE     = {An Experimental Comparison of Localization Methods},
  BOOKTITLE = {Proc.~of the IEEE/RSJ InternationalConference on Intelligent Robots and Systems},
  YEAR      = {1998}
}