Reduction in Sample Size Using Topological Information for Monte Carlo Localization

Monte Carlo localization is known to be one of the most reliable methods for pose estimation of a mobile robot. Much research has been done to improve performance of MCL so far. Although MCL is capable of estimating the robot pose even for a completely unknown initial pose in the known environment, it takes considerable time to give an initial estimate because the number of random samples is usually very large especially for a large-scale environment. For practical implementation of the MCL, therefore, a reduction in sample size is desirable. This paper presents a novel approach to reducing the number of samples used in the particle filter for efficient implementation of MCL. To this end, the topological information generated off- line using a thinning method, which is commonly used in image processing, is employed. The topological map is first created from the given grid map for the environment. The robot scans the local environment using a laser rangefinder and generates a local topological map. The robot then navigates only on this local topological edge, which is likely to be the same as the one obtained off- line from the given grid map. Random samples are drawn near the off-line topological edge instead of being taken with uniform distribution, since the robot traverses along the edge. In this way, the sample size required for MCL can be drastically reduced, thus leading to reduced initial operation time. Experimental results using the proposed method show that the number of samples can be reduced considerably, and the time required for robot pose estimation can also be substantially decreased.