Extraction and matching of elevation moment of inertia for elevation map-based localization of an outdoor mobile robot

The problem of outdoor localization can be practically solved by GPS. However, GPS is not perfect and some areas of outdoor navigation should consider other solutions. This research deals with outdoor localization using an elevation map without GPS. This paper proposes a novel feature, elevation moment of inertia (EMOI), which represents the distribution of elevation as a function of distance from a robot in the elevation map. Each cell of an elevation map has its own EMOI, and outdoor localization can be performed by matching EMOIs obtained from the robot and the pre-given elevation map. The experiments and simulations show that the proposed EMOI can be usefully exploited for outdoor localization with an elevation map and this feature can be easily applied to other probabilistic approaches such as Markov localization method.