A GPS and laser-based localization for urban and non-urban outdoor environments

This paper introduces a localization based on GPS and laser measurements for urban and non-urban outdoor environments. In this approach, the GPS pose is Kalman filtered using wheel odometry and inertial data and tightly integrated into a Monte Carlo localization based on 3D laser range data and a line feature reference map. By applying to this kind of sensor fusion, global localization as well as precise position tracking in close distance to buildings is enabled where only poor GPS observations are available. Following the description of the localization system, real world experiments demonstrate the functionality of the presented approach.