A Fast Algorithm for Robot Localization Using Multiple Sensing Units

This paper presents a fast algorithm for camera selection in a robotic multi-camera localization system. The scenario we study is that where a robot is navigating in an indoor environment using a four-camera vision system to localize itself inside the world. In this context, when something occludes the current camera used for localization, the system has to switch to one of the other three available cameras to remain localized. In this context, the question that arises is that of “what camera should be selected?”. We address this by proposing an approach that aims at selecting the next best view to carry on the localization. For that, the number of static features at each direction is estimated using the optical flow. In order to validate our approach, experiments in a real scenario with a mobile robot system are presented.