Portable Multi-Hypothesis Monte Carlo Localization for Mobile Robots

Self-localization is a fundamental capability that mobile robot navigation systems integrate to move from one point to another using a map. Thus, any enhancement in localization accuracy is crucial to perform delicate dexterity tasks. This paper describes a new location that maintains several populations of particles using the Monte Carlo Localization (MCL) algorithm, always choosing the best one as the sytems's output. As novelties, our work includes a multi-scale match matching algorithm to create new MCL populations and a metric to determine the most reliable. It also contributes the state-of-the-art implementations, enhancing recovery times from erroneous estimates or unknown initial positions. The proposed method is evaluated in ROS2 in a module fully integrated with Nav2 and compared with the current state-of-the-art Adaptive ACML solution, obtaining good accuracy and recovery times.
Comment: Submission for ICRA 2023