Thinning Based Global Topological Map Building with Application to Localization

세선화 기법을 이용한 전역 토폴로지컬 지도의 작성 및 위치추적

Topological maps have drawn more attention recently because they are compact, provide natural interfaces, and are applicable to path planning easily. To build a topological map incrementally, Voronoi diagram was used by many researchers. The Voronoi diagram, however, has difficulty in applying to arbitrarily shaped objects and needs long computation time. In this paper, we present a new method for global topological map from the local topological maps incrementally. The local topological maps are created through a thinning algorithm from a local grid map, which is built based on the sensor information at the current robot position. A thinning method requires simpler computation than the Voronoi diagram. Localization based on the topological map is usually difficult, but additional nodes created by the thinning method can improve localization performance. A series of experiments have been conducted using a two-wheeled mobile robot equipped with a laser scanner. It is shown that the proposed scheme can create satisfactory topological maps.