Landmark Placement for Accurate Mobile Robot Navigation.

摘要

Abstract — Being able to navigate accurately is one of the basic capabilities a mobile robot needs to effectively execute a variety of tasks, including collision avoidance, docking, manipulation, and path following. One popular approach to achieve the desired accuracy is to use artificial landmarks for a sufficiently accurate localization. In this paper, we consider the problem of optimally placing landmarks for robots navigating repeatedly along a given set of trajectories. Our method aims at minimizing the number of landmarks for which a bound on the maximum deviation of the robot from its desired trajectory can be guaranteed with high confidence. The proposed approach incrementally places landmarks utilizing linearized versions of the system dynamics of the robot, thus allowing for an efficient computation of the deviation guarantee. To verify this guarantee for the real and possibly non-linear system dynamics of the robot, our method then performs a Monte Carlo simulation. We evaluate our algorithm in extensive experiments carried out both in simulation and with a real robot. The experiments demonstrate that our method requires substantially fewer landmarks than other approaches to achieve the desired accuracy.