Localization and map building using a sensor-based control strategy

Addresses the problem of simultaneous localization and map building for a mobile robot moving in an unknown environment. We show that the robustness of the techniques currently used can be notably enhanced when they are embedded in a sensor-based control scheme. We are developing such an approach applied to a navigation task of an indoor mobile robot using a 2-D laser range finder. The control objectives related to the sensor based control loop are defined thanks to the properties of the generalized Voronoi diagram. A roadmap of the environment is incrementally built from the laser range information. In this way the robot can explore an unknown scene without any reference trajectory or any prior knowledge about the environment. The localization and mapping process is performed in a probabilistic sense by fusing laser and odometry data thanks to an extended Kalman filter