Thinning-Based Topological Map Building for Local and Global Environments

An accurate and compact map is essential to an autonomous mobile robot system. For navigation, it is efficient to use an occupancy grid map because the environment is represented by probability distribution. But it is difficult to apply it to the large environment since it needs a large amount of memory proportional to the environment size. As an alternative, a topological map can be used to represent it in terms of the discrete nodes with edges connecting them. It is usually constructed by the Voronoi-like graphs, but in this paper the topological map is incrementally built based on the local grid map using the thinning algorithm. This algorithm can extract only meaningful topological information by using the C-obstacle concept in real-time and is robust to the environment change, because its underlying local grid map is constructed based on the Bayesian update formula. In this paper, the position probability is defined to evaluate the quantitative reliability of the end nodes of this thinning-based topological map (TTM). The global TTM can be constructed by merging each local TTM by matching the reliable end nodes determined by the position probability. It is shown that the proposed TTM can represent the environment accurately in real-time and it is readily extended to the global TTM.