Lifelong localization in changing environments

Abstract

Robot localization systems typically assume that the environment is static, ignoring the dynamics inherent in most real-world settings. Corresponding scenarios include households, offices, warehouses and parking lots, where the location of certain objects such as goods, furniture or cars can change over time. These changes typically lead to inconsistent observations with respect to previously learned maps and thus decrease the localization accuracy or even prevent the robot from globally localizing itself. In this paper we present a sound probabilistic approach to lifelong localization in changing environments using a combination of a Rao-Blackwellized particle filter with a hidden Markov model. By exploiting several properties of this model, we obtain a highly efficient map management approach for dynamic environments, which makes it feasible to run our algorithm online. Extensive experiments with a real robot in a dynamically changing environment demonstrate that our algorithm reliably adapts to changes in the environment and also outperforms the popular Monte-Carlo localization approach.