Condition-Invariant Robot Localization Using Global Sequence Alignment of Deep Features

Localization is one of the essential process in robotics, as it plays an important role in autonomous navigation, simultaneous localization, and mapping for mobile robots. As robots perform large-scale and long-term operations, identifying the same locations in a changing environment has become an important problem. In this paper, we describe a robust visual localization system under severe appearance changes. First, a robust feature extraction method based on a deep variational autoencoder is described to calculate the similarity between images. Then, a global sequence alignment is proposed to find the actual trajectory of the robot. To align sequences, local fragments are detected from the similarity matrix and connected using a rectangle chaining algorithm considering the robot’s motion constraint. Since the chained fragments provide reliable clues to find the global path, false matches on featureless structures or partial failures during the alignment could be recovered and perform accurate robot localization in changing environments. The presented experimental results demonstrated the benefits of the proposed method, which outperformed existing algorithms in long-term conditions.