Constraint based world modeling in mobile robotics

Abstract

In this paper we present a novel approach using constraint based techniques for world modeling, i.e. self localization and object modeling. Within the last years, we have seen a reduction of landmarks such as beacons or colored goals within the RoboCup domain. Using other features as line information becomes more important. Using such sensor data is tricky, especially when the resulting position belief is stretched over a larger area. Constraints can overcome this limitations, as they have several advantages: they can represent large distributions and are easy to store and to communicate to other robots. Propagation of several constraints can be computationally cheap. Even high dimensional belief functions can be used. We will describe a sample implementation and show experimental results.