Mobile robot simultaneous localization and map building based on improved particle filter

We present an investigation into the use of pan tilt zoom camera and sonar sensors for simultaneous localization and mapping with artificial colored landmarks. An improved particle filter is applied to estimate a posterior of the pose of the robot, in which each particle has associated it with an entire map. The distributions of landmarks are also represented by particle sets, where separate particles are used to represent the robot and the landmarks. Hough transform is used to extract line segments from sonar observations and build map simultaneously. The key advantage of our method is that the full posterior over robot poses and landmarks can be nonlinearly approximated at every point in time by particles. Especially the landmarks are affixed on the moving robots, which can reduce the impact of the depletion problem and the impoverishment problem produced by basic particle filter. Experimental results show that this approach has advantages over the basic particle filter and the extended Kalman filter.