Robust local localization of a mobile robot in indoor environments using virtual corners

Abstract

This paper deals with the problem of finding the movement of a mobile robot given two consecutive laser scans. The proposed method extracts a line map from the sequence of points in each laser scan, using a probabilistic approach, and then computes virtual corners between two lines in the same line map. The movement of the robot is estimated from correspondences of virtual corners between the two line maps. The combination of the probabilistic approach to find lines and the reduced number of virtual corners are the key ideas to get a simple, fast, robust to outliers, and reliable method to solve the local localization problem. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.