Title :
Topological map building and exploration based on concave nodes
Author :
Cheong, Howon ; Park, Soonyong ; Park, Sung-Kee
Author_Institution :
Center for Cognitive Robot. Res., KIST, Seoul
Abstract :
This paper addresses the problem of topological mapping and exploration of unknown environments for mobile robot. The topological map is constructed by defining the spatial relationship between adjacent nodes and each node that has geometric information about its circumference. A laser range finder is used as the major sensing modality to collect the geometric data. The node point is extracted from the data in two stages: image-based skeletonization and node point decision. The geometric data are transformed into a skeleton image and the node point is determined among the branch points in the image. We adopt an image processing method to skeletonize the geometric data. The key problem of the topological exploration is to determine the target node among the current nodepsilas neighboring nodes. We also propose an efficient target node decision algorithm based on a concept of concave node. An experiment shows that our approach can explore indoor environments more efficiently.
Keywords :
control engineering computing; laser ranging; mobile robots; path planning; robot vision; concave nodes; image processing method; image-based skeletonization; laser range finder; mobile robot; node point decision; spatial relationship; topological map building; Automatic control; Data mining; Extraterrestrial measurements; Geometrical optics; Image processing; Mobile robots; Navigation; Robot sensing systems; Robotics and automation; Skeleton; Concave node; Exploration; Laser range finder; Mobile robot; Topological map;
Conference_Titel :
Control, Automation and Systems, 2008. ICCAS 2008. International Conference on
Conference_Location :
Seoul
Print_ISBN :
978-89-950038-9-3
Electronic_ISBN :
978-89-93215-01-4
DOI :
10.1109/ICCAS.2008.4694318