New constrained initialization for bearing-only SLAM

Abstract

In this paper we present a new landmark initialization technique for Bearing-Only Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithm. The initialization scheme is a type of the delayed constrained initialization method and is different from previous approaches. In our work, it is shown that the angle between sequential observations measured by a bearing-only sensor such as pan-tilt camera and the distance between the vehicle and landmark plays an important role in landmark localization accuracy. Considering this fact, a proper constrained function that utilizes the rotation angle of the camera is applied between multiple landmark location estimates and the best estimate is selected. The simulation results show that the proposed technique is capable to pick out the best initial estimate for landmark location and improves the accuracy of state estimates in Bearing-Only SLAM.