Improved vision-only localization method for mobile robots in indoor environments

To solve the problem of mobile robots needing to adjust their pose for accurate operation after reaching the target point in the indoor environment, a localization method based on scene modeling and recognition has been designed. Firstly, the offline scene model is created by both handcrafted feature and semantic feature. Then, the scene recognition and location calculation are performed online based on the offline scene model. To improve the accuracy of recognition and location calculation, this paper proposes a method that integrates both semantic features matching and handcrafted features matching. Based on the results of scene recognition, the accurate location is obtained through metric calculation with 3D information. The experimental results show that the accuracy of scene recognition is over 90%, and the average localization error is less than 1 meter. Experimental results demonstrate that the localization has a better performance after using the proposed improved method.