Toward real-time 2D localization in outdoor environments

We present an approach to refine the pose estimate of an outdoor mobile robot evolving on flat terrains cluttered with obstacles. We propose an algorithm to extract relevant obstacle contour lines on the basis of stereo-vision data. The algorithm is very robust with respect to the uncertainties on the data, and do not require a very fine and precise obstacle extraction procedure. We explain how the contour lines are compared from one image to another to refine the pose estimate provided by the robot internal sensors.