Sensor planning for mobile robot localization - A hierarchical approach using Bayesian network and particle filter

In this paper we propose a hierarchical approach to solving sensor planning for the global localization of a mobile robot. Our system consists of two subsystems: a lower and a higher layer. The lower layer uses a particle filter to evaluate the posterior probability of the localization. When the particles converge into clusters, the higher layer starts particle clustering and sensor planning to generate an optimal sensing action sequence for the localization. The higher layer uses a Bayesian network for the probabilistic inference. The sensor planning takes into account both localization belief and sensing cost. We conducted simulations and actual robot experiments to validate our proposed approach.