Special Issue on the Seventh European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR’15)

The Special Issue of Robotics and Autonomous Systems presents papers from the Seventh European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR'15). The paper Vision-based Markov Localization for Long Term Autonomy by Benjamin Suger, Michael Ruhnke and Wolfram Burgard describes an approach to localize a mobile robot relative to an image sequence recorded in a different season and its evaluation on several challenging datasets, where the approach outperformed state-of-the-art techniques. The paper Image Features for Visual Teach-and-Repeat Navigation in Changing Environments by Tomas Krajnik, Pablo Cristoforis, Keerthy Kusumam, Peer Neubert and Tom Duckett describes an evaluation of image features for long-term visual teach-and-repeat navigation in outdoor environments with changes in appearance due to seasonal and daily variations. The paper Efficient Retrieval of Arbitrary Objects from Long-Term Robot Observations by Nils Bore, Rares Ambrus, Patric Jensfelt and John Folkesson presents a method for efficient query and retrieval of arbitrarily shaped objects from large amounts of unstructured 3D point cloud data for long-term semantic mapping by mobile service robots. The paper Time-Dependent Gas Distribution Modelling by Sahar Asadi, Han Fan, Victor Hernandez Bennetts and Achim Lilienthal describes an approach for modelling variations over time in gas distributions sensed by mobile robots and predicting future measurements. The paper Probabilistic Ego-Motion Estimation Using Multiple Automotive Radar Sensors by Matthias Rapp, Michael Barjenbruch, Markus Hahn, Juergen Dickmann and Klaus Dietmayer presents a framework for self-motion estimation based on registration of consecutive radar scans and a likelihood model for the Doppler velocity. The paper Integrated Online Trajectory Planning and Optimization in Distinctive Topologies by Christoph Roesmann, Frank Hoffmann and Torsten Bertram presents a novel approach for trajectory planning by mobile robots in the presence of dynamic obstacles such as people.