Loop Closing in Topological Maps

Kristopher R. Beevers and Wesley H. Huang
Submitted to the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
[pdf]

Abstract

In order to create consistent maps of unknown environments, a robot must be able to recognize when it has returned to a previously-visited place. In this paper, we introduce an evidential approach to the loop-closing problem for topological maps, based on the Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence. In our approach, the robot makes a hypothesis whenever it may have revisited a place. It then attempts to verify hypotheses by continuing to traverse the environment, gathering evidence that supports (or refutes) the hypotheses. We describe methods for managing belief about multiple loop-closing hypotheses, and for determining a belief assignment given a piece of evidence. We also discuss methods for reducing the false alarm rate of our loop-closing algorithm, and provide simulated and real-world experimental results that verify the effectiveness of our approach.

BibTeX entry

@STRING{icra = "IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation"}
@InProceedings{Huang03b,
  author = 	 {Kristopher R. Beevers and Wesley H. Huang},
  title = 	 {Loop Closing in Topological Maps},
  booktitle =	 icra,
  year =	 2005,
  note =        {under review}
}