A Hierarchical Approach for Active Mobile Robot Localization

This paper proposes our hierarchical approach to solving sensor planning for the global localization of a mobile robot. Our system consists of two subsystems: a lower layer 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 the optimal sensing action sequence for the localization. The higher layer uses a Bayesian network for 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.