Pose Selection and Feedback Methods in Tandem Combinations of Particle Filters with Scan-Matching for 2D Mobile Robot Localisation

Robot localisation is predominantly resolved via parametric or non-parametric probabilistic methods. The particle filter, the most common non-parametric approach, is a Monte Carlo Localisation (MCL) method that is extensively used in robot localisation, as it can represent arbitrary probabilistic distributions, in contrast to Kalman filters, which is the standard parametric representation. In particle filters, a weight is internally assigned to each particle, and this weight serves as an indicator of a particle’s estimation certainty. Their output, the tracked object’s pose estimate, is implicitly assumed to be the weighted average pose of all particles; however, we argue that disregarding low-weight particles from this averaging process may yield an increase in accuracy. Furthermore, we argue that scan-matching, treated as a prosthesis of (or, put differently, fit in tandem with) a particle filter, can also lead to better accuracy. Moreover, we study the effect of feeding back this improved estimate to MCL, and introduce a feedback method that outperforms current state-of-the-art feedback approaches in accuracy and robustness, while alleviating their drawbacks. In the process of formulating these hypotheses we construct a localisation pipeline that admits configurations that are a superset of state-of-the-art configurations of tandem combinations of particle filters with scan-matching. The above hypotheses are tested in two simulated environments and results support our argumentation.