Global Hough localization for mobile robots in polygonal environments

Knowing the position of a mobile robot in the environment in which it operates is an important element for effectively accomplishing complex tasks requiring autonomous navigation. Among several existing techniques for robot self-localization, a new approach called Hough localization was proposed for map matching in the Hough domain, that turned out to be reliable and efficient for position tracking in polygonal environments. In this paper we present an extension of Hough localization which is able to deal with the global localization problem, in which the robot does not know its initial position in the environment.