Active Mobile Robot Localization

Wolfram Burgard, Dieter Fox, and Sebastian Thrun

Localization is the problem of determining the position of a mobile robot from sensor data. Most existing localization approaches are passive, i.e., they do not exploit the opportunity to control the robot's effectors during localization. This paper proposes an \emph{active} localization approach. The approach provides rational criteria for (1) setting the robot's motion direction (exploration), and (2) determining the pointing direction of the sensors so as to most efficiently localize the robot. Furthermore, it is able to deal with noisy sensors and approximative world models. The appropriateness of our approach is demonstrated empirically using a mobile robot in a structured office environment.

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@INPROCEEDINGS{Burgard97a,
  AUTHOR         = {W. Burgard and D. Fox and S. Thrun},
  YEAR           = {1997},
  TITLE          = {Active Mobile Robot Localization},
  BOOKTITLE      = {Proceedings of the Fourteenth International 
                    Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI)},
  PUBLISHER      = {Morgan Kaufmann},
  ADDRESS        = {San Mateo, CA}
}