Mobile robot localization based on PSO estimator

Localization is fundamental to autonomous operation of the mobile robot. A particle filter (PF) is widely used in mobile robot localization. However, the robot localization based PF has several limitations, such as sample impoverishment and a degeneracy problem, which reduce significantly its performance. Evolutionary algorithms, and more specifically their optimization capabilities, can be used in order to overcome PF based on localization weaknesses. In this paper, mobile robot localization based on a particle swarm optimization (PSO) estimator is proposed. In the proposed method, the robot localization converts dynamic optimization to find the best robot pose estimate, recursively. Unlike the localization based on PF, the resampling step is not required in the proposed method. Moreover, it does not require noise distribution. It searches stochastically along the state space for the best robot pose estimate. The results show that the proposed method is effective in terms of accuracy, consistency, and computational cost compared with localization based on PF and EKF.