Adaptive real-time particle filters for robot localization

Particle filters have recently been applied with great success to mobile robot localization. This success is mostly due to their simplicity and their ability to represent arbitrary, multi-modal densities over a robot's state space. The increased representational power, however, comes at the cost of higher computational complexity. In this paper we introduce adaptive real-time particle filters that greatly increase the performance of particle filters under limited computational resources. Our approach improves the efficiency of state estimation by adapting the size of sample sets on-the-fly. Furthermore, even when large sample sets are needed to represent a robot's uncertainty, the approach takes every sensor measurement into account, thereby avoiding the risk of losing valuable sensor information during the update of the filter. We demonstrate empirically that this new algorithm drastically improves the performance of particle filters for robot localization.