ADAPTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF SVSF FOR A FEATURE-BASED SLAM ALGORITHM USING MAXIMUM LIKELIHOOD ESTIMATION AND EXPECTATION MAXIMIZATION

The smooth variable structure filter (SVSF) has been considered as the robust estimator. Like other filters, the SVSF needs an accurate system model and known noise statistics to approximate the posterior state. Unfortunately, the system cannot be accurately modeled, and the noise statistic is unknown in the real application. For these reasons, the performance of SVSF might be decreased or even led to divergence. Therefore, the enhancement of SVSF is required. This paper presents an Adaptive SVSF. Initially, SVSF is smoothed. To provide the ability to estimate the noise statistic, ASVSF is then derived based on maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) and expectation-maximization (EM). Additionally, the unbiased noise statistic is also approached. However, its covariance is complicatedly formulated. It might cause a negative definite symmetric matrix. Therefore, it is tuned based on the innovation covariance estimator (ICE). The ASVSF is designed to solve the online problem of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). Henceforth, it is termed as the ASVSF-SLAM algorithm. The proposed algorithm showed better accuracy and stability compared to the conventional algorithm in terms of root mean square error (RMSE) for both Estimated Path Coordinate (EPC) and Estimated Map Coordinate (EMC).