A Real-Time Robust Global Localization for Autonomous Mobile Robots in Large Environments

Jianping Xie (1) , Fawzi Nashashibi (1, 2) , Michel Null Parent (1) , Olivier Garcia-Favrot (3)

1 IMARA - Informatique, Mathématiques et Automatique pour la Route Automatisée
2 CAOR - Centre de Robotique
3 INDUCT Recherche et Développement

Global localization aims to estimate a robot's pose in a learned map without any prior knowledge of its initial pose. Achieving highly accurate global localization remains a challenge for autonomous mobile robots especially in large-scale unstructured outdoor environments. This paper introduces a real-time reliable global localization approach with the capability of addressing the kidnapped robot problem using only laser sensors. Our approach includes four steps: 1) local Simultaneous Localization and Mapping 2) map matching 3) position tracking and 4) localization quality evaluation. For sensor perception, we use occupancy grid method to represent robot environment. A novel pyramid grid-map based coarse-to-fine matching approach is proposed to improve the localization accuracy. Experimental results including an outdoor environment of 25,000 m2 are presented to validate the feasibility and reliability of the proposed approach.

Mots clés: Autonomous driving; global localization; SLAM; coarse-to-fine; mobile robots; mapping; laser; lidar; real-time

Domaines: Robotique [cs.RO]; Traitement des images [eess.IV]; Modélisation et simulation; Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]; Systèmes embarqués; Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]

Jianping Xie, Fawzi Nashashibi, Michel Null Parent, Olivier Garcia-Favrot. A Real-Time Robust Global Localization for Autonomous Mobile Robots in Large Environments. International Conference on Control, Automation, Robotics and Vision, Dec 2010, Singapour, Singapore. pp.P0655. ⟨hal-00558603⟩