Qualitative map building method for mobile robots based on co-visibility of landmark objects

This paper presents a qualitative map building method for mobile robots based on the co-visibility of objects. In this method, a robot collects the data of very coarse qualitative information on "whether two objects are visible together or not", estimates the "empirical distances" among the objects, and then reconstructs the configuration of the objects by Multi-Dimensional Scaling (MDS) technique. Simulation results show that this method is able to build qualitatively very accurate maps and is considerably robust against the observation errors such as non-recognition and misrecognition, even though it uses only such incomplete information.