IMPROVEMENT OF 3D MONTE CARLO LOCALIZATION USING A DEPTH CAMERA AND TERRESTRIAL LASER SCANNER

Abstract. Effective and accurate localization method in three-dimensional indoor environments is a key requirement for indoor navigation and lifelong robotic assistance. So far, Monte Carlo Localization (MCL) has given one of the promising solutions for the indoor localization methods. Previous work of MCL has been mostly limited to 2D motion estimation in a planar map, and a few 3D MCL approaches have been recently proposed. However, their localization accuracy and efficiency still remain at an unsatisfactory level (a few hundreds millimetre error at up to a few FPS) or is not fully verified with the precise ground truth. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to improve an accuracy and efficiency of 6DOF motion estimation in 3D MCL for indoor localization. Firstly, a terrestrial laser scanner is used for creating a precise 3D mesh model as an environment map, and a professional-level depth camera is installed as an outer sensor. GPU scene simulation is also introduced to upgrade the speed of prediction phase in MCL. Moreover, for further improvement, GPGPU programming is implemented to realize further speed up of the likelihood estimation phase, and anisotropic particle propagation is introduced into MCL based on the observations from an inertia sensor. Improvements in the localization accuracy and efficiency are verified by the comparison with a previous MCL method. As a result, it was confirmed that GPGPU-based algorithm was effective in increasing the computational efficiency to 10-50 FPS when the number of particles remain below a few hundreds. On the other hand, inertia sensor-based algorithm reduced the localization error to a median of 47mm even with less number of particles. The results showed that our proposed 3D MCL method outperforms the previous one in accuracy and efficiency.