Laser-based position recovery of a free-ranging automatic guided vehicle

This paper develops techniques for position recovery of a free-ranging automatic guided vehicle using a dead-reckoning device and a laser scanner. Extended information filtering (ElF) scheme is presented using a simple rectangular model and a 2-D laser scanner. By continuously updating the robot's pose and matching the laser data with the environmental model, we find that the outliers can be filtered out effectively by validation gate. Moreover, a range-weighted Hough transform (RWHT) is used to extract the modeled lines from the clutter data. Computer simulations and experimental results are performed to illustrate the feasibility and efficacy of the proposed position recovery methods.