Where am I? An NDT-based prior for MCL

One of the key requirements of autonomous mobile robots is a robust and accurate localisation system. Recent advances in the development of Monte Carlo Localisation (MCL) algorithms, especially the Normal Distribution Transform Monte Carlo Localisation (NDT-MCL), provides memory-efficient reliable localisation with industry-grade precision. We propose an approach for building an informed prior for NDT-MCL (in fact for any MCL algorithm) using an initial observation of the environment and its map. Leveraging on the NDT map representation, we build a set of poses using partial observations. After that we construct a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) over it. Next we obtain scores for each distribution in GMM. In this way we obtain in an efficient way a prior for NDT-MCL. Our approach provides a more focused then uniform initial distribution, concentrated in states where the robot is more likely to be, by building a Gaussian mixture model over potential poses. We present evaluations and quantitative results using real-world data from an indoor environment. Our experiments show that, compared to a uniform prior, the proposed method significantly increases the number of successful initialisations of NDT-MCL and reduces the time until convergence, at a negligible initial cost for computing the prior.