Performance Of Simultaneous Localization And Mapping Research Articles

Effective cubature FastSLAM: SLAM with Rao-Blackwellized particle filter and cubature rule for Gaussian weighted integral

Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is a key technology for mobile robot autonomous navigation in unknown environments. While FastSLAM algorithm is a popular solution to the large-scale SLAM problem, it suffers from two major drawbacks: one is particle set degeneracy due to lack of measurements in proposal distribution of particle filter; the other is errors accumulation caused by inaccurate linearization of the nonlinear robot motion model and the environment measurement model. To overcome the problems, a new Jacobian-free cubature FastSLAM (CFastSLAM) algorithm is proposed in this paper. The main contribution of the algorithm lies in the utilization of third-degree cubature rule, which calculates the nonlinear transition density of Gaussian prior more accurately, to design an optimal proposal distribution of the particle filter and to estimate the Gaussian densities of the feature landmarks. On the basis of Rao-Blackwellized particle filter, the proposed algorithm is comprised by two main parts: in the first part, a cubature particle filter (CPF) is derived to localize the robot; in the second part, a set of cubature Kalman filters is used to estimate environment landmarks. The performance of the proposed algorithm is investigated and compared with that of FastSLAM2.0 and UFastSLAM in simulations and experiments. Results verify that the CFastSLAM improves the SLAM performance.

Novel Sonar Salient Feature Structure for Extended Kalman Filter-Based Simultaneous Localization and Mapping of Mobile Robots

Not all line or point features capable of being extracted by sonar sensors from a cluttered home environment are useful for simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) of a mobile robot. This is due to unfavorable conditions such as environmental ambiguity and sonar measurement uncertainty. We present a novel sonar feature structure suitable for a cluttered environment and the extended Kalman filter (EKF)-based SLAM scheme. The key concept is to extract circle feature clouds on salient convex objects by sonar data association called convex saliency circling. The centroid of each circle cloud, called a sonar salient feature, is used as a natural landmark for EKF-based SLAM. By investigating the environmental inherent feature locality, cylindrical objects are augmented conveniently at the weak SLAM-able area as a natural supplementary saliency to achieve consistent SLAM performance. Experimental results demonstrate the validity and robustness of the proposed sonar salient feature structure for EKF-based SLAM.

Efficient Simultaneous Localization and Mapping Based on Ceiling-View: Ceiling Boundary Feature Map Approach

For simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) based on the extended Kalman filter, the size of the state vector is an essential factor because the feasibility depends on it. In this paper, a new SLAM based on ceiling vision (cv-SLAM) is proposed. To keep the size of the state vector compact, the boundaries between ceiling and walls are used as landmarks for visual SLAM (vSLAM). The ceiling boundaries are robust to illuminative variations and they are not as numerous as the point features. Some constraints are imposed on the features based on the characteristics of the ceiling boundaries and an efficient update method called 'double update' is proposed to improve the SLAM performance. The basic idea of the double update is to fully utilize the intersections of the boundary features. Finally, the proposed SLAM is applied to some simulations and experiment, and its effectiveness is demonstrated through them.