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I think you got the interpretation of the values right.

First of all, you should tune the parameters using a bag file, since you can not do anything repeatable on a live system. Record the sensors and the odometry and watch what's happening in rviz playing the bag with amcl running.

Closely look at what happens to your PoseArray and see where and how the robot gets lost. If there is a displacement when the robot turns, it's odom_alpha4 etc.

"Too high" values are usually not a big problem since this will spread out the samples more and you still have a good one in the sampleset. If the values are too low, however, the actual pose of the robot will often not be reflected anymore by any of the samples. (never underestimate the error!)

So when in doubt, raise the values. On the PR2 for example the robot will still localize quite well when going from values between 0-1 to values around 10. It could use more up computation time though, since more samples will be used.