Development of Intelligent Mobile Cart in a Crowded Environment – Robust Localization Technique with Unknown Objects –

Abstract

This paper describes a localization method for mobile robots. The proposed method is based on a three dimensional space observation model that provides stochastic information for robot location assumption. We previously developed a localization method based on the two dimensional space observation model to be used in an environment with many unknown obstacles such an pedestrians. The previous method used a twodimensional laser scanner and particle filtering to realize robust effective localization of the mobile robot in such environments. It sometimes failed to estimate the robots’ location due to a lack of information about its environment, so we extended the previous method based on a three-dimensional space observationmodel that is expected to use richer information about its environment. Experimental results showed that our proposed method localizes robots successfully in environments where the previous method could not localize robots accurately.