Probabilistic Appearance Based Navigation and Loop Closing

This paper describes a probabilistic framework for navigation using only appearance data. By learning a generative model of appearance, we can compute not only the similarity of two observations, but also the probability that they originate from the same location, and hence compute a pdf over observer location. We do not limit ourselves to the kidnapped robot problem (localizing in a known map), but admit the possibility that observations may come from previously unvisited places. The principled probabilistic approach we develop allows us to explicitly account for the perceptual aliasing in the environment - identical but indistinctive observations receive a low probability of having come from the same place. Our algorithm complexity is linear in the number of places, and is particularly suitable for online loop closure detection in mobile robotics.