Finding landmarks for mobile robot navigation

Localization addresses the problem of determining the position of a mobile robot from sensor data. This paper presents an algorithm, called BaLL, which enables a mobile robot to learn a set of landmarks used in localization and to learn how to recognize them using artificial neural networks. BaLL is based on a statistical localization approach. It is applicable to a large variety of sensors and environments. Experiments with a mobile robot equipped with sonar sensors and a camera illustrate that BaLL identifies highly useful landmarks.