LiDAR-Based Deep Learning-Enabled Geometric Fingerprinting for Indoor Robot Localization

Localization is a fundamental requirement for autonomous mobile robot navigation. Several localization techniques exist, but they often require extensive installation of beacons, careful parameter tuning, high computational requirements, or an immense amount of training data. Environmental (e.g., indoor)/resource constraints, sensor degradation, and sudden pose discontinuities can make such methods unreliable. This creates a critical gap: the lack of a simple, lightweight localization method that can operate as a primary localization method or in parallel with other classical systems and provide reliable pose estimates during primary localization system failures. Thus, this paper proposes a lightweight, deep learning (DL)-based, two-dimensional LiDAR localization method. The approach combines LiDAR scan range data with eleven proposed handcrafted geometric features to train a Convolutional Multi-Layer Perceptron (ConvMLP) regression model for predicting the two-dimensional location of a robot, which is further smoothed by an augmented recursive Extended Kalman filter (EKF). The overall system is validated in three real-world environments. The results are compared against various existing machine learning (ML) models and other well-known localization techniques. The experimental results demonstrate a 280 Hz pose-update rate, achieving a 13 cm Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) using the ConvMLP model alone, which further reduces to 5 cm when fused with the recursive EKF.