Building topological models for navigation in large scale environments

In mobile robotics, pure geometric representations may not be well suited for navigation in large scale environments. New models combine topological and metrical information to give compact and efficient representations. We briefly review the outlines of the construction of our Voronoi-like graph and give further details about its implementation in a real environment. Several trials made around our lab demonstrate the ability of our modeling scheme to recognize topological features of the environment and use them to detect loops and relocalize the robot position.