General Feature Extraction for Mapping and Localization of a Mobile Robot Using Sparsely Sampled Sonar Data

This study introduces a method of general feature extraction for building a map and localization of a mobile robot using only sparsely sampled sonar data. Sonar data are acquired by using a general fixed-type sensor ring that frequently provides false returns on the locations of objects. We first suggest a data association filter that can classify sets of sonar data that are associated with the same hypothesized feature into one group. A feature extraction method is then introduced to decide the exact geometric parameters of the hypothesized feature in the group. We also show the possibility of extracting a circle feature consistently as well as a line or a point feature by using the proposed filter. These features are then assembled to build a global map and applied to extended Kalman filter-based localization of the robot. We demonstrate the validity of the proposed filter with the results of mapping and localization produced by real experiments.