On Robot Localization Safety for Fixed-Lag Smoothing: Quantifying the Risk of Misassociation

Monitoring localization safety will be necessary to certify the performance of robots that operate in life-critical applications, such as autonomous passenger vehicles or delivery drones because many current localization safety methods do not account for the risk of undetected sensor faults. One type of fault, misassociation, occurs when a feature extracted from a mapped landmark is associated to a non-corresponding landmark and is a common source of error in feature-based navigation applications. This paper accounts for the probability of misassociation when quantifying landmark-based mobile robot localization safety for fixed-lag smoothing estimators. We derive a mobile robot localization safety bound and evaluate it using simulations and experimental data in an urban environment. Results show that localization safety suffers when landmark density is relatively low such that there are not enough landmarks to adequately localize and when landmark density is relatively high because of the high risk of feature misassociation.