PHD-SLAM 2.0: efficient SLAM in the presence of missdetections and clutter

This article addresses simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) via probability hypothesis density (PHD) filtering. The resulting approach, named PHD-SLAM, has demonstrated its effectiveness, especially when measurements provided by the sensors onboard the vehicle are highly contaminated by missdetections and clutter. However, since the proposal distribution (PD) of standard PHD-SLAM does not take into account most recently received measurements, a huge amount of particles are typically needed in order to achieve satisfactory performance. In this article, a new PD, which aims to approximate the vehicle pose posterior, is proposed for PHD-SLAM. The resulting algorithm, named PHD-SLAM 2.0, allows for drastically reducing the number of particles, and hence, the computational burden, while preserving the SLAM performance. The computational complexity of PHD-SLAM 2.0 is analyzed, and its performance is assessed via both simulated and real-data experiments.