Reliable Robot Localization: A Constraint-Programming Approach Over Dynamical Systems

Localization for underwater robots remains a challenging issue. Typical sensors, such as Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receivers, cannot be used under the surface and other inertial systems suffer from a strong integration drift. On top of that, the seabed is generally uniform and unstructured, making it difficult to apply Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) methods to perform localization. Reliable Robot Localization presents an innovative new method which can be characterized as a raw-data SLAM approach. It differs from extant methods by considering time as a standard variable to be estimated, thus raising new opportunities for state estimation, so far underexploited. However, such temporal resolution is not straightforward and requires a set of theoretical tools in order to achieve the main purpose of localization. This book not only presents original contributions to the field of mobile robotics, it also offers new perspectives on constraint programming and set-membership approaches. It provides a reliable contractor programming framework in order to build solvers for dynamical systems. This set of tools is illustrated throughout this book with realistic robotic applications.

Simon Rohou is an Associate Professor at ENSTA Bretagne -Lab-STICC (Brest, France).

Luc Jaulin is Full Professor of Robotics at ENSTA Bretagne-Lab-STICC.

Lyudmila Mihaylova is Professor of Signal Processing and Control with the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering at the University of Sheffield (UK).

Fabrice Le Bars is an Associate Professor at ENSTA Bretagne-Lab-STICC.

Sandor M. Veres holds a chair in Autonomous Control Systems, and leads the Robotics and Autonomous Systems Research Group at the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering at the University of Sheffield.