Experimental results for walking navigation system using fast SLAM

Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) has been an important topic for robotics. The technology will also be useful for walking navigation for, e.g., blind persons. We are developing a system using a laser range sensor and a pushcart designed to assist walking persons. Recently, interests in localization and map building with laser range sensor have been increasing in robotics community. A system using a laser range sensor is with low computational cost, and is robust for environment changes (e.g. lighting condition, etc.). As the first step in this project, we consider the localization of a moving cart with laser range sensor and building environment map. We will compare some scan matching algorithms. We will use FastSLAM algorithm where particle filters are used for tracking the position estimation.