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Conjugate Unscented FastSLAM for Autonomous Mobile Robots in Large-Scale Environments

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Abstract

Map learning and self-localization based only on a perception of an environment’s structure are fundamental cognitive capacities required for intelligent robot’s to realize true autonomy. Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is an effective technique for such robots, as it addresses the problem of incrementally building an environment map from noisy sensory data and tracking the robot’s pose with the built map. While the Rao-Blackwellized particle filter (RBPF) is a popular SLAM technique, it tends to accumulate errors introduced by inaccurate linearization of the SLAM nonlinear function. Accordingly, RBPF-SLAM will usually fail to close large loops when applied to large-scale environments. To overcome this drawback, a new Jacobian-free RBPF-SLAM algorithm is derived in this paper. The main contribution of the algorithm lies in the utilization of the 5th-order conjugate unscented transform, which calculates the SLAM transition density up to the 5th order, to give a better distribution of the particle filter and discover local features and landmarks. The performance of the proposed SLAM is investigated and compared with that of FastSLAM2.0 and UFastSLAM in both indoor and outdoor experiments. The results verify that the proposed algorithm improves the SLAM performance in large-scale environments.

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Acknowledgments

This work was jointly supported by State Key Laboratory of Robotics and System of Harbin Institute of Technology (Grant No. SKLRS-2009-ZD-04), National Nature Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 60909055, 61005070), China Postdoctoral Science Foundation Special Funded Project (Grant No. 201003144), and Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China (Grant No. 2014JBM014). The authors gratefully acknowledge T. Bailey for the SLAM simulator, The University of Sydney for the Victoria Park dataset, and the University of Bremen for the DLR dataset.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing, China

    Y. Song & Y. F. Kang

  2. State Key Laboratory of Robotics and System of HIT, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China

    Y. Song

  3. School of Mechanical Electronic and Information Engineering, China University of Mining and Technology, Beijing, China

    Q. L. Li

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  1. Y. Song
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  2. Q. L. Li
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  3. Y. F. Kang
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Correspondence to Y. Song.

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Song, Y., Li, Q.L. & Kang, Y.F. Conjugate Unscented FastSLAM for Autonomous Mobile Robots in Large-Scale Environments. Cogn Comput 6, 496–509 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12559-014-9258-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12559-014-9258-z

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