Robust local localization of a mobile robot using a 180° 2-D laser range finder

This paper describes a robust method for local self-localization using point-to-point and point-to-line matching with a Lorentzian estimator A 2-D laser telemeter is used to obtain distance measurements around the mobile robot within a 180 degrees range. The goal is to find the rigid transformation (displacement and rotation) that match two consecutive laser scans despite noisy measurements (outliers). In order to obtain the transformation parameters the Newton-Levenberg-Marquardt optimization method is used. Experimental results compare this approach with a correlation method and a point-to-point correspondence based on least squares. The proposed method shows better results, particularly when there is noisy data.