Development of laser rangefinder-based SLAM algorithm for mobile robot navigation

This paper describes a new implementation of the SLAM algorithm for a mobile robot operating in an outdoor environment such as the IGVC Navigation Challenge, using relative obstacle observation profile from laser rangefinder. The proposed SLAM is possible for the mobile robot to start in an unknown location in an unknown environment and, using relative observations only, incrementally build a perfect map of the world and to compute simultaneously a bounded estimate of mobile robot location by the extended Kalman filter. To confirm the proposed SLAM method, an electric wheelchair based mobile robot is used for implementation and testing.