SLAM of a Mobile Robot using Thinning-based Topological Information

  • Lee, Yong-Ju (Department of Mechanical Engineering, Korea University) ;
  • Kwon, Tae-Bum (Department of Mechanical Engineering, Korea University) ;
  • Song, Jae-Bok (Department of Mechanical Engineering, Korea University)
  • Published : 2007.10.31

Abstract

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) is the process of building a map of an unknown environment and simultaneously localizing a robot relative to this map. SLAM is very important for the indoor navigation of a mobile robot and much research has been conducted on this subject. Although feature-based SLAM using an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) is widely used, it has shortcomings in that the computational complexity grows in proportion to the square of the number of features. This prohibits EKF-SLAM from operating in real time and makes it unfeasible in large environments where many features exist. This paper presents an algorithm which reduces the computational complexity of EKF-SLAM by using topological information (TI) extracted through a thinning process. The global map can be divided into local areas using the nodes of a thinning-based topological map. SLAM is then performed in local instead of global areas. Experimental results for various environments show that the performance and efficiency of the proposed EKF-SLAM/TI scheme are excellent.

Keywords

References

  1. J. J. Leonard and H. F. Durrant-Whyte, Directed Sonar Sensing for Mobile Robot Navigation, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston, MA, 1992
  2. S. B. Williams, H. F. Durrant-Whyte, and T. Baily, 'Map management for efficient simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM),' Autonomous Robots, vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 267-286, May 2002 https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1015217631658
  3. M. Montemerlo and S. Thrun, 'Simultaneous localization and mapping with unknown data association using FastSLAM,' Proc. of IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, pp. 1985-1991, September 2003
  4. J. E. Guivant and E. M. Nebot, 'Optimization of the simultaneous localization and map-building algorithm for real-time implementation,' IEEE Trans. on Robotics and Automation, vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 242-257, June 2001 https://doi.org/10.1109/70.938382
  5. S. S. Lee, S. H. Lee, and D. S. Kim, 'Recursive unscented Kalman filtering based SLAM using a large number of noisy observations,' International Journal of Control, Automation, and Systems, vol. 4, no. 6, pp. 736-747, December 2006
  6. S. Thrun, W. Burgard, and D. Fox, Probability Robotics, MIT press, Cambridge, MA, 2005
  7. B. Y. Ko and J. B. Song, 'Real-time building of thinning-based topological map with metric features,' Proc. of Int. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems, pp. 1524-1529, 2004
  8. T. Baily, E. M. Nebot, J. K. Rosenblatt, and H. F. Durrant-Whyte, 'Data association for mobile robot navigation: A graph theoretic approach,' Proc. of Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation, pp. 2512-2517, 2000
  9. L. Zhang, 'Line segment based map building and localization using 2D laser rangefinder,' Proc. of Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation, pp. 2538-2543, 2000