Approximate Inference Particle Filtering for Mobile Robot SLAM

This paper proposes approximate inference particle filtering for mobile robot simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) with landmarks. Range-bearing measurements are obtained by detecting landmarks using an onboard laser range finder and the maximum likelihood approach is used to handle unknown data associations. The system model is created depending on the robot motion and range-bearing measurements. The new particle filter is developed to estimate the robot pose and landmark locations separately based on approximate inferences, where the intractable distributions of the robot pose and landmark locations are approximated by optimal Gaussian distributions minimizing Kullback-Leibler divergences. Simulations and experiments are provided to show the performance of the proposed particle filter. Note to Practitioners—The SLAM technique is crucial to an autonomous mobile robot. The laser range finder perceives surroundings and is used for mobile robot SLAM in global positioning system denied environments. This paper proposes a mobile robot SLAM method based on the robot motion model and the onboard laser range finder. Range-bearing measurements are extracted from raw data of the laser range finder as the inputs of the method. The simulations and experiments indicate the proposed method has better accuracy and more robust to unknown data associations. The proposed method can be applied to many practical applications such as transport operations and mowing with a mobile robot. In the future, we will address the SLAM technique for multiple mobile robots.