An improved weighting strategy for Rao-Blackwellized Probability Hypothesis Density simultaneous localization and mapping

The use of random finite sets (RFSs) in simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) for mobile robots is a new concept that provides several advantages over traditional vector-based approaches. These include: 1) the incorporation of detection statistics, as well as the usual spatial uncertainty, in an estimation algorithm, 2) the ability to estimate the number of landmarks in a map, and 3) the circumvention of the need for data association heuristics. Solutions to SLAM can be obtained through the Rao-Blackwellized Probability Hypothesis Density (RB-PHD) filter, which is an approximation of the Bayes filter for RFSs using both particles to represent the robot trajectories, and Gaussian mixtures to represent their associated maps. This paper proposes an improved multi-feature particle weighting strategy for the RB-PHD filter and shows through simulations that it outperforms existing weighting strategies. The proposed strategy makes the RB-PHD filter a generalization of multi-hypothesis (MH) FastSLAM, a vector-based SLAM solution that uses the RB-particle filter.