Mobile Robot Localization: Where We Are and What Are the Challenges?

This article surveys recent developments in the area of mobile robot localization. The focus is on indoor 3-D localization from vision and RGB-D data. We analyze three important aspects of the architecture of localization systems: perception, representation of the obtained data, and estimation of the robot trajectory from the internal representation of the outer environment. We attempt also to identify challenges and open problems in the domain. The analysis is illustrated by extensive references to the selected literature, as this paper was also conceived as a guide for those researchers, who want to enter the fascinating realm of SLAM for the first time.

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