Global localization by soft object recognition from 3D Partial Views

Global localization is a widely studied problem, and in essence corresponds to the online robot pose estimation based on a given map with landmarks, an odometry model, and real robot sensory observations and motion. In most approaches, the map provides the position of visible objects, which are then recognized to provide the robot pose estimation. Such object recognition with noisy sensory data is challenging. In this paper, we present an effective global localization technique using soft 3D object recognition to estimate the pose with respect to the landmarks in the given map. A depth sensor acquires a partial view for each observed object, from which our algorithm extracts the robot pose relative to the objects, based on a library of 3D Partial View Heat Kernel descriptors. Our approach departs from methods that require classification and registration against complete 3D models, which are prone to errors due to noisy sensory data and object misclassifications in the recognition stage. We experimentally validate our method in different robot paths with different common 3D environment objects. We also show the improvement of our method compared to when the partial view information is not used.