Robot environment modeling via principal component regression

A key issue in mobile robot applications involves building a map of the environment to be used by the robot for localization and path planning. We propose a framework for robot map building which is based on principal component regression, a statistical method for extracting low-dimensional dependencies between a set of input and target values. A supervised set of robot positions (inputs) and associated high-dimensional sensor measurements (targets) are assumed. A set of globally uncorrelated features of the original sensor measurements are obtained by applying principal component analysis on the target set. A parametrized model of the conditional density function of the sensor features given the robot positions is built based on an unbiased estimation procedure that fits interpolants for both the mean and the variance of each feature independently. The simulation results show that the average Bayesian localization error is an increasing function of the principal component index

Auxiliary particle filter robot localization from high-dimensional sensor observations

We apply the auxiliary particle filter algorithm of Pitt and Shephard (1999) to the problem of robot localization. To deal with the high-dimensional sensor observations (images) and an unknown observation model., we propose the use of an inverted nonparametric observation model computed by nearest neighbor conditional density estimation. We show that the proposed model can lead to a fully adapted optimal filter, and is able to successfully handle image occlusion and robot kidnap. The proposed algorithm is very simple to implement and exhibits a high degree of robustness in practice. We report experiments involving robot localization from omnidirectional vision in an indoor environment

Supervised linear feature extraction for mobile robot localization

We are seeking linear projections of supervised high-dimensional robot observations and an appropriate environment model that optimize the robot localization task. We show that an appropriate risk function to minimize is the conditional entropy of the robot positions given the projected observations. We propose a method of iterative optimization through a probabilistic model based on kernel smoothing. To obtain good starting optimization solutions we use canonical correlation analysis. We apply our method on a real experiment involving a mobile robot equipped with an omnidirectional camera in an office setup

Mapping large environments with an omnivideo camera

We study the problem of mapping a large indoor environment using an omnivideo camera. Local features from omnivideo images and epipolar geometry are used to compute the relative pose between pairs of images. These poses are then used in an Extended Information Filter using a trajectory based representation where only the robot poses corresponding to captured images are reconstructed. The features with the geometric constraints also give a robust similarity measure that is used for data association. Our experiments show that an accurate map can be built in real time of a small office environment. For large environments, big loops can be closed and a map can be built in nearly linear time