Infrastructure-Free Global Localization in Repetitive Environments: An Overview

Repetitive environment is a challenging scenario for mobile robot global localization due to its highly similar structures and lack of distinctive features. Existing solutions in such environments rely heavily on pre-installed infrastructures, which are neither flexible nor cost-effective. Besides, few of the previous research have been focused on the implementation of infrastructure-free localization approaches in repetitive scenarios. Thus, this paper serves as a survey to investigate the problem of infrastructure-free mobile robot global localization with low-cost and efficient sensors in repetitive environments. Three of the most popular infrastructure-free localization methods, namely LiDAR-based localization (LBL), vision-based localization (VBL), and magnetic field-based localization (MFL), are analyzed and evaluated. Extensive global localization experiments are conducted in real-world repetitive scenarios and the results demonstrate that VBL methods perform slightly better than LBL and MFL methods. The overall evaluations indicate that infrastructure-free global localization in repetitive environment is still a challenging problem which deserves more research efforts to develop new solutions.