Correlation Based Approach to Mobile Robot Pose Tracking in Unknown Environments

The usage of mobile robots in service sector is increasing in the past decade. There are already mobile robots as night guards, tourist guides, transportation units, etc. In order to efficiently perform its task, a mobile robot has to know precisely its current pose. Also to simplify the commissioning of a mobile robot system various algorithms for map building without a human intervention have been developed. In both cases a reliable and robust pose tracking module that can compensate the influence of systematic and non-systematic localization errors in real time is crucial. This paper presents a mobile robot pose tracking approach based on subsequent laser scan readings processed by usage of histograms and correlation comparison. Results obtained with a differential drive mobile robot are given to demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed approach.