Maximum Consensus Localization using an Objective Function based on Helmert's Point Error

Ego-localization is a crucial task for autonomous vehicles. On the one hand, it needs to be very accurate, and on the other hand, very robust to provide reliable pose (position and orientation) information, even in challenging environments. Finding the best ego-position is usually tied to optimizing an objective function based on the sensor measurements. The most common approach is to maximize the likelihood, which leads under the assumption of normally distributed random variables to the well-known least squares minimization, often used in conjunction with recursive estimation, e. g. using a Kalman filter. However, least squares minimization is inherently sensitive to outliers, and consequently, more robust loss functions, such as L1 norm or Huber loss have been proposed. Arguably the most robust loss function is the outlier count, also known as maximum consensus optimization, where the outcome is independent of the outlier magnitude. In this paper, we investigate in detail the performance of maximum consensus localization based on LiDAR data. We elaborate on its shortcomings and propose a novel objective function based on Helmert's point error. In an experiment using 3001 measurement epochs, we show that the maximum consensus localization based on the introduced objective function provides superior results with respect to robustness.