On-line construction of iconic maps

This paper describes an approach to the automated creation of virtual realities (or virtual maps) of an a priori unknown environment by using a mobile robot. The method we propose is aimed at the creation of an image-based or iconic map, rather than a representation in terms of 2D or 3D spatial occupancy. A key aspect of this is having a mobile robot automatically select points and views of interest that can be used to exemplify the appearance of the environment. This paper develops the use of alpha-backtracking as a technique to efficiency select these points of estimated globally maximum interest