An iconic position estimator for a 2D laser rangefinder

The authors present an iconic approach for estimating the pose of a mobile robot equipped with a radial laser rangefinder that requires minimal structure in the environment. The algorithm uses a connected set of short line segments to approximate the shape of any environment and can easily be constructed by the rangefinder itself. The authors describe techniques for efficiently managing the environment map, matching the sensor data to the map and computing the robot´s position. Accuracy and runtime results for the implementation are included