Experiments and Analysis of MCL Based Localization for Mobile Robot Navigation

This paper describes some experimental study on Monte Carlo Localization (MCL) approach of a mobile robot. The proposed method uses ultrasonic range data for localization. Ultrasonic signal is generated and radiated from a beacon whose location is given a priori. The receiver located on board a robot detects the range from the beacon using the received ultrasonic signal. The research proposes a sensor model for the range sensing based on statistical analysis of the sensor output. In the experiments, commercialized beacons and detectors are used. Through the experiments, the performance of the proposed method is verified and compared under various conditions. The experiments show the performance of the method in case of kidnapping. Especially, analysis on how the number of available beacons affects the localization performance is provided. The localization performance is investigated for the case of stationary robot and moving robot. Also, it presents the localization performance in the case where the wheels of the robot slip on the floor. Through the experiments and analysis, it is demonstrated that the method works in the cases of kidnapping, wheel slip, and possibly with only two sensor data available.