Planetary global localization is necessary for long-range rover missions in which communication with command center operator is throttled due to the long distance. There has been number of researches that address this problem by exploiting and matching rover surroundings with global digital elevation maps (DEM). Using conventional methods for matching, however, is challenging due to artifacts in both DEM rendered images, and/or rover 2D images caused by DEM low resolution, rover image illumination variations and small terrain features. In this work, we use train CNN discriminator to match rover 2D image with DEM rendered images using conditional Generative Adversarial Network architecture (cGAN). We then use this discriminator to search an uncertainty bound given by visual odometry (VO) error bound to estimate rover optimal location and orientation. We demonstrate our network capability to learn to translate rover image into DEM simulated image and match them using Devon Island dataset. The experimental results show that our proposed approach achieves ~74% mean average precision.

This paper proposes a novel upward-looking camera-based global localization using a ceiling image map. The ceiling images obtained through the SLAM process are integrated into the ceiling image map using a particle filter. Global localization is performed by matching the ceiling image map with the current ceiling image using SURF keypoint correspondences. The robot pose is then estimated by the coordinate transformation from the ceiling image map to the global coordinate system. A series of experiments show that the proposed method is robust in real environments.

Global localization is one of the essential issues for mobile robot navigation. In this study, an indoor global localization method is proposed which uses a Kinect sensor and a monocular upward-looking camera. The proposed method generates an environment map which consists of a grid map, a ceiling feature map from the upward-looking camera, and a spatial feature map obtained from the Kinect sensor. The method selects robot pose candidates using the spatial feature map and updates sample poses by particle filter based on the grid map. Localization success is determined by calculating the matching error from the ceiling feature map. In various experiments, the proposed method achieved a position accuracy of 0.12m and a position update speed of 10.4s, which is robust enough for real-world applications.

We present an implementation of particle filter algorithm for global localization and kidnap recovery of mobile robot. Firstly, we propose an algorithm for efficient particle initialization using sonar line features. And then, the average likelihood and entropy of normalized weights are used as a quality measure of pose estimation. Finally, we propose an active kidnap recovery by adding new particle set. New and independent particle set can be initialized by monitoring two quality measures. Added particle set can re-estimate the pose of kidnapped robot. Experimental results demonstrate the capability of our global localization and kidnap recovery algorithm.