Robot Relocation from Laser Scanning Constraints Using Minimalistic Environmental Models

Relocation is the process of determining the pose of a mobile robot with respect to a world-fixed reference frame with no assumption about its previous states. This capability is often needed in long-lasting autonomous navigation, in the case the localization process fails and the robot has to initialize again its own pose estimation. The relocation procedure presented in this paper is an extension of the algorithm presented by Lim and Leonard [10] and is basically a solution to the problem of searching a correspondence between information gathered from sensors and information available from the map, aimed at the initialization of a starting localization process. The effectiveness of the relocation procedure is demonstrated through a number of experiments, clearly showing the robustness of the method.