Development and performance comparison of extended Kalman filter and particle filter for self-reconfigurable mobile robots

In this paper we develop two filters, extended Kalman filter (EKF) and particle filter (PF), for autonomous docking of mobile robots and compare the performances of the two filers in terms of accuracy. Robots are equipped with IR emitters/receivers and encoders, and their data is used to estimate the distance and orientation of robots, which is needed for docking. The two state estimation methods are compared in simulations under different conditions. Simulation results demonstrate that the estimation accuracy of the EKF is higher than PF when the initial state is correctly estimated. However, when the initial state is not estimated correctly, the state estimation of EKF does not converge to the true value. On the other hand, PF state estimation successfully converges to the true value and the error is more consistent. The result of this work can help researchers and practitioners to design and use proper filters for docking applications.