Low-Cost IR sensor-based localization using accumulated range information

Localization which estimates a robot's position and orientation in a given environment is very important for mobile robot navigation. Although low-cost sensors are preferred for practical service robots, they suffer from the inaccurate and insufficient range information. This paper proposes a novel approach to increasing the success rate of low-cost sensor-based localization. In this paper, both the previous and the current data obtained from the IR sensors are used for localization in order to utilize as much environment information as possible without increasing the number of sensors. The sensor model used in the monte carlo localization (MCL) is modified so that the accumulated range information may be used to increase the accuracy in estimating the current robot pose. The experimental results show that the proposed method can robustly estimate the robot's pose in indoor environments with several similar places.