Lab Meeting 20 Oct., 2006 (Jim) : Constrained Initialisation for Bearing-Only SLAM

Constrained Initialisation for Bearing-Only SLAM
Tim Bailey, ICRA2003, PDF

This paper investigates the feature initialisation problem for bearing-only SLAM. Bearing-only SLAM is an attractive capability due to its relationship with cheap vision sensing, but initialising landmarks is difficult. First, the landmark location is unconstrained by a single measurement, and second, the location estimate due to several measurements may be ill-conditioned. This paper presents a solution to the the feature initialisation problem via the method of "constrained initialisation", where measurements are stored and initialisation is deferred until sufficient constraints exist for a well-conditioned solution. A primary contribution of this paper is a measure of "well-conditioned" for initialisation within the traditional extended Kalman Filter (EKF) framework.