Integrating global position estimation and position tracking for mobile robots: the dynamic Markov localization approach

• Published in: Proceedings. 1998 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. Innovations in Theory, Practice and Applications (Cat. No.98CH36190) Vol. 2; pp. 730 - 735 vol.2
• Main Authors: Burgard, W., Derr, A., Fox, D., Cremers, A.B.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English; Japanese
• Published: IEEE 1998
• Subjects: Computer science; Condition monitoring; Humans; Mobile robots; Orbital robotics; Robustness; State estimation; State-space methods; Testing; Uncertainty
• ISBN: 9780780344655; 0780344650
• DOI: 10.1109/IROS.1998.727279

Localization is one of the fundamental problems of mobile robots. In order to efficiently perform useful tasks such as office delivery, mobile robots must know their position in their environment. Existing approaches can be distinguished according to the type of localization problem they are designed to solve. Tracking techniques aim at monitoring the robot's position. They assume that the position is initially known and cannot recover from situations in which they lost track of the robot's position. Global localization techniques on the other hand, are able to estimate the robot's position under complete uncertainty. We present the dynamic Markov localization technique as a uniform approach to position estimation, which is able (1) to globally estimate the position of the robot, (2) to efficiently track its position whenever the robot's certainty is high, and (3) to detect and recover from localization failures. The approach has been implemented and intensively tested in real-world environments. We present several experiments illustrating the strength of our method.