Range-only SLAM with indistinguishable landmarks; a constraint programming approach

Abstract

This paper deals with the simultaneous localization and mapping problem (SLAM) for a robot. The robot has to build a map of its environment while localizing itself using a partially built map. It is assumed that (i) the map is made of point landmarks, (ii) the landmarks are indistinguishable, (iii) the only exteroceptive measurements correspond to the distance between the robot and the landmarks. This paper shows that SLAM can be cast into a constraint network the variables of which being trajectories, digraphs and subsets of źn.$\mathbb {R}^{n}.$ Then, we show how constraint propagation can be extended to deal with such generalized constraint networks. As a result, due to the redundancy of measurements of SLAM, we demonstrate that a constraint-based approach provides an efficient backtrack-free algorithm able to solve our SLAM problem in a guaranteed way.