We present a system capable of simultaneously estimating the position of an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) and the positions of stationary range-only beacons. Notably, our system does not require beacon positions a priori, and our system performs well even when range measurements are severely degraded by noise and outliers. We present a powerful outlier rejection method that can identify groups of range measurements that are consistent with each other, and a method for initializing beacon positions in an EKF. We have successfully applied our algorithms to real-world data and have demonstrated a SLAM system whose navigation performance is comparable to that of systems that assume known beacon locations.
@article{olson2006joe, AUTHOR = {Edwin Olson and John Leonard and Seth Teller}, TITLE = {Robust Range-Only Beacon Localization}, JOURNAL = {IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering}, VOLUME = {31}, NUMBER = {4}, PAGES = {949-958}, MONTH = {October}, YEAR = {2006}, }