Abstract
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.
