A Flexible Method for Performance Evaluation of Robot Localization

摘要

An important research issue in mobile robotics is performance assessment of robot SLAM algorithms in terms of their localization accuracy. Typically, SLAM algorithms are evaluated with the help of benchmark datasets or expensive equipment such as motion capture. Benchmark datasets however, are environment-specific, and use of motion capture constrains spatial coverage and affordability. In this paper, we present a novel method for SLAM performance evaluation, which only uses distinctive markers (such as AR tags), randomly placed in the robot navigation environment at arbitrary locations, and observes these markers with a camera onboard of the robot. Formulated as a generative latent optimization (GLO) problem, our method uses the local robot-to-marker poses to evaluate the global robot pose estimates by a SLAM algorithm and therefore its performance. Through extensive experiments on two robots, three localization/SLAM algorithms and both LiDAR and RGB-D sensors, we demonstrate the feasibility and accuracy of our proposed method.