Exploiting Multi-hop Inter-beacon Measurements in RO-SLAM.

This chapter presents a Range Only (RO) Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) scheme that integrates multi-hop inter-beacon range measurements. While few SLAM schemes use inter-beacon measurements, to the best of our knowledge, none of them integrates multi-hop inter-beacon measurements. In our scheme the robot gathers inter-beacon measurements with configurable hop number so that it can integrate measurements between beacons far beyond the robot’s sensing range. This chapter analyzes the impact of integrating in SLAM inter-beacon measurements with different hop numbers and evaluates its performance and robustness to measurement and odometry noise levels. It also validates its results in real experiments. It shows that the advantages of using inter-beacon measurements increase with measurements with higher hop numbers.