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（RO）定位是指通过测量与特定锚点之间的距离来确定移动机器人位置的技术。由于测量信息维度低，单个距离传感器无法提供足够信息来估计机器人的完整姿态，因此RO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（IMU）等其他传感模态相结合才能估计完整姿态。本文提出了一种基于连续时间高斯过程（GP）的轨迹估计方法，仅利用多个距离传感器的距离测量值即可估计机器人的完整姿态。仿真与真实实验结果表明，所提方法在使用现成距离传感器的情况下，能够达到与现有最先进的传感器融合方法（使用额外传感模态）相当的性能，甚至在某些场景中表现更优。