Sensor based robot localisation and navigation: using interval analysis and unscented Kalman filter

Multiple sensor fusion for robot localisation and navigation has attracted a lot of interest in recent years. This paper describes a sensor based navigation approach using an interval analysis (IA) based adaptive mechanism for an unscented Kalman filter (UKF). The robot is equipped with inertial sensors (INS), encoders and ultrasonic sensors. A UKF is used to estimate the robots position using the inertial sensors and encoders. Since the UKF estimates may be affected by bias, drift etc. we propose an adaptive mechanism using IA to correct these defects in estimates. In the presence of landmarks the complementary robot position information from the IA algorithm using ultrasonic sensors is used to estimate and bound the errors in the UKF robot position estimate.