Mobile Robot Localization Considering Class of Sensor Observations

Localization robustness against environment dynamics is significant for robots to achieve autonomous navigation in unmodified environments. A basic method of improving the robustness of a robot is considering the sensor observations obtained from mapped obstacles and using them for localizing the robot's pose. This study proposes an observation model that considers the class of sensor observations, where “class” categorizes the sensor observations as those obtained from mapped and unmapped obstacles. In the proposed approach, the robot's pose and the class are estimated simultaneously. As a result, the robot's pose can be localized using the sensor observations obtained only from mapped obstacles. First, we evaluated the performance of the proposed approach using simulations. Further, we tested the proposed approach in a real-world mobile robot navigation competition, called “Tsukuba Challenge,” held in Japan. The robustness and effectiveness of the proposed approach against environment dynamics were verified from the experimental results.