Generating topological map from occupancy grid-map using virtual door detection

This paper proposes a method for a cleaning robot to generate a topological map from an occupancy grid-map. Virtual door is defined as the candidates of real door, and the virtual doors are detected as edges of the topological map by extracting corner features from the occupancy grid-map; using this method, an initial topological map is generated, which consists of nodes and edges. The final topological map is generated using a genetic algorithm to merge the nodes and reduce the edges. As a result, the generated topological map consists of nodes divided by virtual doors and edges located in real doors. The proposed methods provide a topological map for the user interaction and the cleaning robot, and the topological map can be used to plan more efficient motion including room-to-room path planning and covering each room.