Variational Bayesian Estimator for Mobile Robot Localization With Unknown Noise Covariance

This article studies mobile robot localization with unknown noise covariance. The AprilTag is used as landmarks and observed using the onboard camera. The system model is created based on the mobile robot motion and AprilTag measurements. The unknown measurement noise covariance is considered as a random matrix satisfying an inverse Wishart distribution. A variational Bayesian estimator is proposed to estimate the robot pose, AprilTag locations, and measurement noise covariance, where the Rao–Blackwellized estimator is developed for robot pose and AprilTag location estimation, and variational Bayesian approximation is adopted for measurement noise covariance estimation. Simulations and experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.