Range-only (RO) localization involves determining the position of a mobile robot by measuring the distance to specific anchors. RO localization is challenging since the measurements are low-dimensional and a single range sensor does not have enough information to estimate the full pose of the robot. As such, range sensors are typically coupled with other sensing modalities such as wheel encoders or inertial measurement units (IMUs) to estimate the full pose. In this work, we propose a continuous-time Gaussian process (GP)- based trajectory estimation method to estimate the full pose of a robot using only range measurements from multiple range sensors. Results from simulation and real experiments show that our proposed method, using off-the-shelf range sensors, is able to achieve comparable performance and in some cases outperform alternative state-of-the-art sensor-fusion methods that use additional sensing modalities.

翻译：纯距离定位通过测量与特定锚点的距离来确定移动机器人的位置。由于测量数据维度较低，且单一距离传感器不足以估计机器人的完整位姿，因此纯距离定位具有挑战性。通常，距离传感器需要与轮式编码器或惯性测量单元等其他传感模态结合来估计完整位姿。本文提出了一种基于连续时间高斯过程的轨迹估计方法，利用多个距离传感器的距离测量值来估计机器人的完整位姿。仿真与真实实验结果表明，采用商用距离传感器时，所提方法能达到与现有最先进的传感器融合方法可比的性能，且在某些情况下甚至优于这些需额外传感模态的替代方法。