Abstract
Robust localization system has proven to be a cornerstone for mobile robot autonomy. Although passive robot localization is a mature field, it still could fail in challenging environments containing symmetries or open spaces. Active localization can fix this issue by allowing the robot to improve pose estimation by choosing specific actions. We propose an active localization strategy for the indoor position tracking problem in challenging environments. The proposed active localization is performed in three steps: (i) cluster the particle cloud with Spectral Clustering (or Kmeans\(++\)) algorithm, (ii) search and select the most informative point in a reduced search space, and (iii) execute rotational actions in order to sense the selected point. Hence, a significant number of wrong hypotheses are pruned. We also introduce a novel study that considers evaluates points in spatial neighborhoods all at once, instead of evaluating each cell independently. Simulated experiments show an improvement in robot pose estimation using the proposed strategy. Real-world validation in symmetric and open office-like environment is also presented.
Similar content being viewed by others
Explore related subjects
Discover the latest articles, news and stories from top researchers in related subjects.Data Availibility
The developed code and generated data for the Active Localization System presented in this research are available in [31]. If the reader has any doubts or needs, do not hesitate to contact the authors.
References
Fox, D., Burgard, W., Thrun, S.: Markov localization for mobile robots in dynamic environments. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 11, 391–427 (1999)
Fox, D., Burgard, W., Dellaert, F., Thrun, S.: Monte carlo localization: efficient position estimation for mobile robots. AAAI/IAAI 1999, 343–349 (1999)
Burgard, W., Fox, D., Thrun, S.: Active mobile robot localization. In: IJCAI’97 Proceedings Conf. Artif. Intell (1997)
Roy, N., Thrun, S.: Coastal Navigation with Mobile Robots. In: MIT Press, pp. 1043–1049 (2000)
Dudek, G., Romanik, K., Whitesides, S.: Localizing a Robot with Minimum Travel. In: SIAM J. Comput., vol. 27, pp. 583-604. Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, Philadelphia, PA, USA. (1998) http://dx.doi.org/10.1137/S0097539794279201
Li, A.Q., Xanthidis, M., O’Kane, J.M., Rekleitis, I.: Active localization with dynamic obstacles. In: IEEE/RSJ IROS, pp. 1902–1909 (2016)
Hsiao, M., Mangelson, J., Suresh, S., Debrunner, C., Kaess, M.: Aras: Ambiguity-aware robust active slam based on multi-hypothesis state and map estimations. In: 2020 IEEE/RSJ IROS, pp. 5037–5044 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS45743.2020.9341384
Andrade, F., LLofriu, M., Tanco, M.M., Barnech, G.T., Tejera, G.: Active localization for mobile service robots in symmetrical and open environments. In: 2021 Latin American Robotics Symposium (LARS), 2021 Brazilian Symposium on Robotics (SBR), and 2021 Workshop on Robotics in Education (WRE), pp. 270–275 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1109/LARS/SBR/WRE54079.2021.9605406
Rieppi, A., Barnech, G.T., Andrade, F.: Localización activa para robots de servicio basada en la agrupación de puntos de discrepancia. In: Congreso Argentino de Sistemas Embebidos (CASE) 2021, pp. 22–22 (2021)
Inoue, H., Ono, M., Tamaki, S., Adachi, S.: Active localization for planetary rovers. In: 2016 IEEE Aero. Conf., pp. 1–7 (2016)
Maurović, I., Seder, M., Lenac, K., Petrović, I.: Path planning for active slam based on the d* algorithm with negative edge weights. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems 48(8), 1321–1331 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1109/TSMC.2017.2668603
Liu, Z., Chen, W., Wang, Y., Wang, J.: Localizability estimation for mobile robots based on probabilistic grid map and its applications to localization. In: IEEE Inter. Conf. MFI, pp. 46–51 (2012)
Zhang, Z., Scaramuzza, D.: Beyond Point Clouds: Fisher Information Field for Active Visual Localization. In: ICRA, pp. 5986–5992 (2019)
Jung, M., Song, J.: Efficient autonomous global localization for service robots using dual laser scanners and rotational motion. In: IJCAS, vol. 15, pp. 743–751 (2017)
Correa, J., Soto, A.: Active visual perception for mobile robot localization. In: J. of Intell. Rob. Sys. (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-009-9348-4
Bonetto, E., Goldschmid, P., Pabst, M., Black, M., Ahmad, A.: irotate: Active visual slam for omnidirectional robots. arXiv:2103.11641 (2021)
Velez, J., Hemann, G., Huang, A., Posner, I., Roy, N.: Planning to Perceive: Exploiting Mobility for Robuts Object Detection. In: Proceedings of the Twenty-First International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (2011)
Brooks, R.: A robust layered control system for a mobile robot. IEEE J. on Rob. and Aut. 2(1), 14–23 (1986)
Siciliano, B., Khatib, O.: Springer Handbook of Robotics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg (2007)
Buitinck, L., Louppe, G., Blondel, M., Pedregosa, F., Mueller, A., Grisel, O., Niculae, V., Prettenhofer, P., Gramfort, A., Grobler, J., Layton, R., VanderPlas, J., Joly, A., Holt, B., Varoquaux, G.: API design for machine learning software: experiences from the scikit-learn project. In: ECML PKDD Workshop, pp. 108–122 (2013)
Ester, M., Kriegel, H.-P., Sander, J., Xu, X.: A density-based algorithm for discovering clusters in large spatial databases with noise. In: Proceedings Conf. Knowledge Disc. and D. M. KDD’96, pp. 226–231. AAAI Press, Palo Alto, CA (1996)
Pedregosa, F., Varoquaux, G., Gramfort, A., Michel, V., Thirion, B., Grisel, O., Blondel, M., Prettenhofer, P., Weiss, R., Dubourg, V., Vanderplas, J., Passos, A., Cournapeau, D., Brucher, M., Perrot, M., Duchesnay, E.: Scikit-learn: machine learning in python. Journal of Machine Learning Research 12, 2825–2830 (2011)
Arthur, D., Vassilvitskii, S.: K-means\(++\): The Advantages of Careful Seeding. In: Proceedings ACM-SIAM Symp. on D. Alg. SODA ’07, pp. 1027–1035. Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, Philadelphia, PA, USA (2007). http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1283383.1283494. Accessed 10 Oct 2022
Ng, A.Y., Jordan, M.I., Weiss, Y.: On Spectral Clustering: Analysis and an Algorithm. In: Proceedings Conf. on Neural Inf. Pro. Sys. NIPS’01, pp. 849–856. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA (2001). http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2980539.2980649. Accessed 10 Oct 2022
Fox, D.: KLD-Sampling: Adaptive Particle Filters and Mobile Robot Localization. In: Proceedings Conf. on Neural Inf. Pro. Sys. NIPS’01, pp. 713–720. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA (2001)
Milstein, A., Sánchez, J., Williamson, E.: Robust global localization using clustered particle filtering. In: AAAI/IAAI, pp. 581–586 (2002)
Chiang, M., Mirkin, B.: Intelligent choice of the number of clusters in k-means clustering: an experimental study with different cluster spreads. Journal of classification 27(1), 3–40 (2010)
Thrun, S., Burgard, W., Fox, D.: Probabilistic Robotics. Intelligent robotics and autonomous agents. MIT Press (2005)
Koenig, N., Howard, A.: Design and use paradigms for Gazebo, an opensource multi-robot simulator. In: IEEE/RSJ IROS, vol. 3, pp. 2149–21543 (2004)
Garage, W.: Turtlebot. In: http://turtlebot.com/, pp. 11–25 (2011). Accessed 10 Oct 2022
Software from Active Localization Strategy for Hypotheses Pruning in Challenging Environments. https://gitlab.fing.edu.uy/fandrade/active-localization. Accessed 10 Oct 2022
Funding
Authors did not receive support from any organization for the submitted work.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Federico Andrade. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Federico Andrade. Federico Andrade and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing Interests
The authors have no financial or proprietary interests in any material discussed in this article.
Ethics approval
This research does not involve human or animal subjects. Therefore, the authors have nothing to declare here.
Consent to participate
This research does not involve human or animal subjects. Therefore, the authors have nothing to declare here.
Consent to publish
This research does not involve human or animal subjects. Therefore, the authors have nothing to declare here.
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Martín Llofriu, Mercedes Marzoa Tanco, Guillermo Trinidad Barnech and Gonzalo Tejera are contributed equally to this work.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Andrade, F., Llofriu, M., Marzoa Tanco, M. et al. Active Localization Strategy for Hypotheses Pruning in Challenging Environments. J Intell Robot Syst 106, 47 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-022-01748-4
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-022-01748-4