An improved FastSLAM system based on distributed structure for autonomous robot navigation

Abstract

Fast simultaneous localization and mapping (FastSLAM) is an efficient algorithm for autonomous navigation of mobile vehicle. However, FastSLAM must reconfigure the entire vehicle state equation when the feature points change, which causes an exponential growth in quantities of computation and difficulties in isolating potential faults. In order to overcome these limitations, an improved FastSLAM, based on the distributed structure, is developed in this paper. There are two state estimation parts designed in this improved FastSLAM. Firstly, a distributed unscented particle filter is used to avoid reconfiguring the entire system equation in the vehicle state estimation part. Secondly, in the landmarks estimation part, the observation model is designed as a linear one to update the landmarks states by using the linear observation errors. Then, the convergence of the proposed and improved FastSLAM algorithm is given in the sense of mean square. Finally, the simulation results show that the proposed distributed algorithm could reduce the computational complexity with high accuracy and high fault-tolerance performance.