A Basic Consideration on Estimation of Robot Positions by Observing Unknown Environment

This paper presents a method which reduces uncertainty of a position and a direction of an autonomous robot by observing environment with a camera. In the proposed method, the state of the robot is represented by a state vector obeying a probability distribution. The robot creates and renews an environment map by considering the information from the mounted camera. Moreover, the robot revises the probability distribution on its state by comparing the map and the information from the camera. This attempt at avoiding the inconsistency in the map reduces the uncertainty of the state of the robot. We present experimental results to show the possibility of this method.