EKF-based SLAM Using Sonar Salient Feature and Line Feature for Mobile Robots

Abstract

Not all line or point features capable of being extracted by sonar sensors from cluttered home environments are useful for simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) due to their ambiguity because it is difficult to determine the correspondence of line or point features with previously registered feature. Confused line and point features in cluttered environments leads to poor SLAM performance. We introduce a sonar feature structure suitable for a cluttered environment and the extended Kalman filter (EKF)-based SLAM scheme. The reliable line feature is expressed by its end points and engaged togather in EKF SLAM to overcome the geometric limits and maintain the map consistency. Experimental results demonstrate the validity and robustness of the proposed method.