Self-localization in Large-Scale Environments for the Bremen Autonomous Wheelchair

This paper presents RouteLoc, a new approach for the absolute self-localization of mobile robots in structured large-scale environments. As experimental platform, the Bremen Autonmous Wheelchair “Rolland” is used on a 2,176m long journey across the campus of the Universität Bremen. RouteLoc poses only very low requirements with regard to sensor input, resources (memory, computing time), and a-priori knowledge. The approach is based on a hybrid topological-metric representation of the environment. It scales up very well, and is thus suitable for self-localization of service robots in large-scale environments. The evaluation of RouteLoc is done with a pure metric approach as reference method. It compares scan-matching results of laser range finder data with the position estimates of RouteLoc on a metric basis.