• International Journal of Fuzzy Logic and Intelligent Systems
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.41-48
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• 2014

This paper analyzes the Monte Carlo localization (MCL) method, which estimates the pose of an indoor mobile robot. A mobile robot must know where it is to navigate in an indoor environment. The MCL technique is one of the most influential and popular techniques for estimation of robot position and orientation using a particle filter. For the analysis, we perform experiments in an indoor environment with a differential drive robot and ultrasonic range sensor system. The analysis uses MATLAB for implementation of the MCL and investigates the effects of the control parameters on the MCL performance. The control parameters are the uncertainty of the motion model of the mobile robot and the noise level of the measurement model of the range sensor.

• The Journal of the Korea institute of electronic communication sciences
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.288-295
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• 2011

The paper proposes a localization method of an underwater robot using Monte Carlo Localization(MCL) approach. Localization is one of the fundamental basics for autonomous navigation of an underwater robot. The proposed method resolves the problem of accumulation of position error which is fatal to dead reckoning method. It deals with uncertainty of the robot motion and uncertainty of sensor data in probabilistic approach. Especially, it can model the nonlinear motion transition and non Gaussian probabilistic sensor characteristics. In the paper, motion model is described using Euler angles to utilize the MCL algorithm for position estimation of an underwater robot. Motion model and sensor model are implemented and the performance of the proposed method is verified through simulation.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.12 no.5
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• pp.450-456
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• 2006

Monte Carlo localization is known to be one of the most reliable methods for pose estimation of a mobile robot. 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 pose estimate because the number of random samples is usually very large especially for a large-scale environment. For practical implementation of 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 through the thinning technique, which is commonly used in image processing, is employed. The global topological map is first created from the given grid map for the environment. The robot then 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 similar to the one obtained off-line from the given grid map. Random samples are drawn near the topological edge instead of being taken with uniform distribution all over the environment, since the robot traverses along the edge. 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 without adverse effects on the performance of MCL.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.15 no.8
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• pp.845-850
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• 2009

Localization which estimates a robot's position and orientation in a given environment is very important for mobile robot navigation. Although low-cost sensors are preferred for practical service robots, they suffer from the inaccurate and insufficient range information. This paper proposes a novel approach to increasing the success rate of low-cost sensor-based localization. In this paper, both the previous and the current data obtained from the IR sensors are used for localization in order to utilize as much environment information as possible without increasing the number of sensors. The sensor model used in the monte carlo localization (MCL) is modified so that the accumulated range information may be used to increase the accuracy in estimating the current robot pose. The experimental results show that the proposed method can robustly estimate the robot's pose in indoor environments with several similar places.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2005.06a
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• pp.901-905
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• 2005

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.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.117-123
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• 2014

Localization is one of the essential tasks necessary to achieve autonomous navigation of a mobile robot. One such localization technique, Monte Carlo Localization (MCL) is often applied to a digital surface model. However, there are differences between range data from laser rangefinders and the data predicted using a map. In this study, commonly observed from air and ground (COAG) features and candidate selection based on the shape of sensor data are incorporated to improve localization accuracy. COAG features are used to classify points consistent with both the range sensor data and the predicted data, and the sample candidates are classified according to their shape constructed from sensor data. Comparisons of local tracking and global localization accuracy show the improved accuracy of the proposed method over conventional methods.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.3 no.2
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• pp.117-122
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• 2008

This paper presents a multi-robot localization based on multidimensional scaling (MDS) in spite of the existence of incomplete and noisy data. While the traditional algorithms for MDS work on the full-rank distance matrix, there might be many missing data in the real world due to occlusions. Moreover, it has no considerations to dealing with the uncertainty due to noisy observations. We propose a robust MDS to handle both the incomplete and noisy data, which is applied to solve the multi-robot localization problem. To deal with the incomplete data, we use the Nystr$\ddot{o}$m approximation which approximates the full distance matrix. To deal with the uncertainty, we formulate a Bayesian framework for MDS which finds the posterior of coordinates of objects by means of statistical inference. We not only verify the performance of MDS-based multi-robot localization by computer simulations, but also implement a real world localization of multi-robot team. Using extensive empirical results, we show that the accuracy of the proposed method is almost similar to that of Monte Carlo Localization(MCL).

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.19 no.8
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• pp.667-675
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• 2013

This paper presents vision-based techniques for underwater landmark detection, map-based localization, and SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) in structured underwater environments. A variety of underwater tasks require an underwater robot to be able to successfully perform autonomous navigation, but the available sensors for accurate localization are limited. A vision sensor among the available sensors is very useful for performing short range tasks, in spite of harsh underwater conditions including low visibility, noise, and large areas of featureless topography. To overcome these problems and to a utilize vision sensor for underwater localization, we propose a novel vision-based object detection technique to be applied to MCL (Monte Carlo Localization) and EKF (Extended Kalman Filter)-based SLAM algorithms. In the image processing step, a weighted correlation coefficient-based template matching and color-based image segmentation method are proposed to improve the conventional approach. In the localization step, in order to apply the landmark detection results to MCL and EKF-SLAM, dead-reckoning information and landmark detection results are used for prediction and update phases, respectively. The performance of the proposed technique is evaluated by experiments with an underwater robot platform in an indoor water tank and the results are discussed.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.16 no.5
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• pp.420-427
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• 2010

This paper describes a localization method based on Monte Carlo Localization approach for a mobile robot. The method uses range data which are measured from ultrasound transmitting beacons whose locations are given a priori. The ultrasound receiver on-board a robot detects the range from the beacons. The method requires several beacons, theoretically over three. The method proposes a sensor model for the range sensing based on statistical analysis of the sensor output. The experiment uses commercialized beacons and detector which are used for trilateration localization. The performance of the proposed method is verified through real implementation. Especially, it is shown that the performance of the localization degrades as the sensor update rate decreases compared with the MCL algorithm update rate. Though the method requires exact location of the beacons, it doesn't require geometrical map information of the environment. Also, it is applicable to estimation of the location of both the beacons and robot simultaneously.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.154-159
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• 2014

The Global Positioning System (GPS) is widely used to aid the navigation of aerial vehicles. However, the GPS cannot be used indoors, so alternative navigation methods are needed to be developed for micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) flying in GPS-denied environments. In this paper, a real-time three-dimensional (3-D) indoor navigation system and closed-loop control of a quad-rotor aerial vehicle equipped with an inertial measurement unit (IMU) and a low-cost light detection and ranging (LIDAR) is presented. In order to estimate the pose of the vehicle equipped with the two-dimensional LIDAR, an octree-based grid map and Monte-Carlo Localization (MCL) are adopted. The navigation results using the MCL are then evaluated by making a comparison with a motion capture system. Finally, the results are used for closed-loop control in order to validate its positioning accuracy during procedures for stable hovering and waypoint-following.