Multi-observation sensor resetting localization with ambiguous landmarks

Successful approaches to the robot localization problem include particle filters, which estimate non-parametric localization belief distributions. Particle filters are successful at tracking a robot’s pose, although they fare poorly at determining the robot’s global pose. The global localization problem has been addressed for robots that sense unambiguous visual landmarks with sensor resetting, by performing sensor-based resampling when the robot is lost. Unfortunately, for robots that make sparse, ambiguous and noisy observations, standard sensor resetting places new pose hypotheses across a wide region, in poses that may be inconsistent with previous observations. We introduce multi-observation sensor resetting (MOSR) to address the localization problem with sparse, ambiguous and noisy observations. MOSR merges observations from multiple frames to generate new hypotheses more effectively. We demonstrate experimentally on the NAO humanoid robots that MOSR converges more efficiently to the robot’s true pose than standard sensor resetting, and is more robust to systematic vision errors.