SUMMARY This work is concerned with the problem of robot localization using standard RFID tags as landmarks and an RFID reader as a landmark sensor. A main advantage of such an RFID-based localization system is the availability of landmark ID measurement, which trivially solves the data association problem. While the main drawback of an RFID system is its low spatial accuracy. The result in this paper is an improvement of the localization accuracy for a standard short-range RFID sensor. One of the main contributions is a proposal of a machine learning approach in which multiple classifiers are trained to distinguish RFID-signal features of each location. Another contribution is a design tool for tag arrangement by which the tag configuration needs not be manually designed by the user, but can be automatically recommended by the system. The effectiveness of the proposed technique is evaluated experimentally with a real mobile robot and an RFID system. key words: robot localization, RFID, Support Vector Machine, landmark arrangement

In this paper we discuss landmark based absolute localization of tiny autonomous mobile robots in a known environment. Landmark features are naturally occurring as it is not allowed to modify the environment with special navigational aids. These features are sparse in our application domain and are frequently occluded by other robots. This makes simultaneous acquisition of two or more landmarks difficult. Therefore, we propose a system that requires a single landmark feature. The algorithm is based on range measurement of a single landmark from two arbitrary points whose displacement can be measured using dead-reckoning sensors. Range estimation is done with a stereo vision system. Simulation results show that the robot can localize itself if it can estimates range of the same landmark from two different position and if the displacement between the two position is known. 1.

Abstract A SIFT algorithm in spherical coordinates for omnidirectional images is proposed. This algorithm can generate two types of local descriptors, Local Spherical Descriptors and Local Planar Descriptors. With the first ones, point matching between two omnidirectional images can be performed, and with the second ones, the same matching process can be done but between omnidirectional and planar images. Furthermore, a planar to spherical mapping is introduced and an algorithm for its estimation is given. This mapping allows to extract objects from an omnidirectional image given their SIFT descriptors in a planar image. Several