Probabilistic Self-Localization for Sensor Networks

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 21

Volume

Technical Papers

Robotics and Computer Vision

This paper describes a technique for the probabilistic self-localization of a sensor network based on noisy inter-sensor range data. Our method is based on a number of parallel instances of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). By combining estimates drawn from these parallel chains, we build up a representation of the underlying probability distribution function (PDF) for the network pose. Our approach includes sensor data incrementally in order to avoid local minima and is shown to produce meaningful results efficiently. We return a distribution over sensor locations rather than a single maximum likelihood estimate. This can then be used for subsequent exploration and validation.