Global localization of a mobile robot in indoor environment using special frequency analysis of 2D range data

We propose a new approach for finding a location when a mobile robot stays in a indoor environment. In this approach, a spatial frequency analysis is applied to 2D range data obtained by a laser scanner, which is conducted as follows: first, a mobile robot surveys the whole subject area, collecting 2D range data consecutively at short intervals. The collected 2D range data are used as a reference. Second, the robot is placed somewhere in the environment, then it takes current 2D range data at the place, and finds its location out in the reference data. All the 2D range data are treated as binary images and are transformed into the spatial frequency domain. Matching between the reference and current 2D range data is conducted on the spatial frequency domain. This method has an advantage of exploiting the cross-correlation index for similarity evaluation of the matching.