Single sound source SLAM

Abstract

Bearing-only Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) is a partially observable SLAM problem, in wich the sensor used for perceiving the robot's enviroment, provides only-angular information respect to the landmarks, and therefore does not give enough information to compute the full state of a landmark from a single observation. In this context, vision-based systems have also gained a great interest in the robotics community. Nevertheless the use of "sound sources" as map's features have been very little explored in SLAM. In this work a method for performing SLAM with sound sources is presented. A robot capable of sense bearing information respect to an external sound source with modest angular acuity (∈-∈10°) is considered.At the robot trajectory start, the sound source position is unknown; while the robot moves, the position of the sound source and the robot position in a global coordinate frame are both estimated. Experimental results with simulations and with a real robot demonstrate that tracking a unique source sound is enough to reasonably correct the odometry information provided by the encoders. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.