Non-stop outdoor navigation of a mobile robot-retroactive positioning data fusion with a time consuming sensor system

We propose a position estimation technique for nonstop outdoor navigation of an autonomous mobile robot. The proposed position estimation technique is based on maximum likelihood estimation. To cope with the parallel processing of internal and external sensor information and time delay in the sensor data process, we introduce the retroactive positioning data fusion technique. The proposed technique is implemented on our small size autonomous mobile robot. An experimental result is shown, in which our robot could navigate itself without stopping even when it takes several seconds of processing time to detect landmark from external sensor data.