A Fast Linear Method for Mobile Robot Localization from Landmark Bearings

Abstract

The paper presents an algorithm which estimates the position and orientation of a mobile robot from three or more noisy landmark bearing measurements, The main question answered is how to deal correctly and efficiently with the case of when more than three measurements are provided. The method is based on linearc onstraints, one due to each bearing measurement. This linear system can be solved at low computational cost but yields not very accurate results. We therefore transform the system to an equivalent linear system which yields virtually optimal results at a small fraction of the cost of a non-linear optimization method which usually achieves the optimal result. Experimental results showing the quality of the results and the low computational cost are presented. The analysis that we performed can also be applied to other problems which result in fast accurate estimation algorithms.