On mobile robots: A probabilistic model for the representation and manipulation of spatial uncertainty

Abstract

A mobile robot needs to represent and to reason about the approximate relationships between itself and other objects. In addition, the robot must be able to use sensor information to reduce locational uncertainty. In this paper we present a general probabilistic model which permits to represent the motions of 2-D or 3-D mobile robots and to estimate the distribution of a chain of relative transforms without strong assumptions.