학술논문

Probabilistic Appearance-Invariant Topometric Localization With New Place Awareness
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters IEEE Robot. Autom. Lett. Robotics and Automation Letters, IEEE. 6(4):6985-6992 Oct, 2021
Subject
Robotics and Control Systems
Computing and Processing
Components, Circuits, Devices and Systems
Location awareness
Probabilistic logic
Indexes
Task analysis
Visualization
Smoothing methods
Navigation
Localization
autonomous vehicle navigation
vision-based navigation
Language
ISSN
2377-3766
2377-3774
Abstract
Probabilistic state-estimation approaches offer a principled foundation for designing localization systems, because they naturally integrate sequences of imperfect motion and exteroceptive sensor data. Recently, probabilistic localization systems utilizing appearance-invariant visual place recognition (VPR) methods as the primary exteroceptive sensor have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance in the presence of substantial appearance change. However, existing systems 1) do not fully utilize odometry data within the motion models, and 2) are unable to handle route deviations, due to the assumption that query traverses exactly repeat the mapping traverse. To address these shortcomings, we present a new probabilistic topometric localization system which incorporates full 3-dof odometry into the motion model and furthermore, adds an “off-map” state within the state-estimation framework, allowing query traverses which feature significant route detours from the reference map to be successfully localized. We perform extensive evaluation on multiple query traverses from the Oxford RobotCar dataset exhibiting both significant appearance change and deviations from routes previously traversed. In particular, we evaluate performance on two practically relevant localization tasks: loop closure detection and global localization. Our approach achieves major performance improvements over both existing and improved state-of-the-art systems.