This paper proposes a novel method for computing robot motion uncertainty from ranging sensor data. The method utilises the recently proposed CRF-Matching procedure which matches laser scans based on shape descriptors. Motion estimates are computed in a probabilistic framework by performing inference on a probabilistic graphical model. We propose an efficient sampling procedure for obtaining probable association hypothesis of the probabilistic graphical model. The hypothesis are used to generate estimates on the uncertainty of translational and rotational movements of the robot. Experiments demonstrate the benefits of the approach on simulated data sets and on laser scans from an urban environment. The approach is also combined with the well-established delayed-state information filter for a large-scale outdoor simultaneous localisation and mapping task.

This paper presents a novel framework for integrating fundamental tasks in robotic navigation through a statistical inference procedure. A probabilistic model that jointly reasons about scan-matching, moving object detection and their motion estimation is developed. Scan-matching and moving object detection are two important problems for full autonomy of robotic systems in complex dynamic environments. Popular techniques for solving these problems usually address each task in turn disregarding important dependencies. The model developed here jointly reasons about these tasks by performing inference in a probabilistic graphical model. It allows different but related problems to be expressed in a single framework. The experiments demonstrate that jointly reasoning results in better estimates for both tasks compared to solving the tasks individually.