One of the main areas of research in the field of intelligent vehicles and mobile robots is Autonomous navigation. In this field, we seek to create algorithms and methods that give robots the ability to move safely and autonomously in a complex and dynamic environment. In this field, localization and mapping algorithms have an important place. Indeed,without reliable information about the robot position (localization) and the nature of its environment (mapping), the other algorithms (trajectory generation, obstacle avoidance ...) cannot achieve their tasks properly. We focused our work during this thesis on a specific problem: to develop a simple, fast and lightweight SLAM algorithm that can minimize localization errors without loop closing. At the center of our approach, there is an IML algorithm: Incremental Maximum Likelihood. This kind of algorithms is based on an iterative estimation of the localization and the mapping. It contains thus naturally a growing error in the localization process. The choice of IML isjustified mainly by its simplicity and lightness. The main idea of our work is built around thedifferent tools and algorithms used to minimize the localization error of IML, while keeping its advantages.
