Topological Map Merging

Wesley H. Huang and Kristopher R. Beevers
The 7th International Symposium on Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems (DARS 2004)
Pages 91--100.
[pdf]

Abstract

A key capability for teams of mobile robots is to cooperatively explore and map an environment. Maps created by one robot must be merged with those from another robot — a difficult problem when the robots do not have a common reference frame. This problem is greatly simplified when topological maps are used because they provide a concise description of the navigability of a space. In this paper, we formulate an algorithm for merging two topological maps that uses aspects of maximal subgraph matching and image registration methods. Simulated and real-world experiments demonstrate the efficacy of our algorithm.

BibTeX entry

@InProceedings{Huang04a,
  author = 	 {Wesley H. Huang and Kristopher R. Beevers},
  title = 	 {Topological Map Merging},
  booktitle =	 {Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems (DARS)},
  year =	 2004,
  pages =         {91--100}
}