Efficient Distributed Particle Filter for Robust Range-Only SLAM

Compared with simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) problems based on Lidar or visual sensors, range-only SLAM (RO-SLAM) is lacking bearing information. It brings challenges to particle sampling and SLAM estimation. This article proposes an efficient distributed particle filter (EDPF) for RO-SLAM problems. To overcome the difficulties of sampling in a high-dimensional state space, EDPF is decomposed into a set of subparticle filters (sub-PFs) with low dimensionality. Each sub-PF corresponds with an observed beacon, which directly reduces the sampling complexity. A joint weight update method is proposed to exploit the correlation among sub-PFs. It reweighs the particles via an auxiliary distribution after each sub-PF’s local filtering and embodies a better proposal distribution for distributed filtering. In addition, a beacon diagnosis method is proposed, it can detect and reinitialize the wrong converged beacon position estimates, which further reduces the SLAM error accumulation problem. We consider a RO-SLAM system with an odometer and ultrawideband (UWB) to verify the proposed EDPF. Results show that EDPF outperforms many existing RO-SLAM methods, which obtains the best performance with the acceptable computational load.