Image skeletonization method applied to generation of topological maps

The environment mapping has been a great challenge of many researchers of the mobile robot autonomous navigation area. There are two important paradigms for mapping, metric and topological mapping. Several methods that combine the advantages of each paradigm have been proposed. Thereby the aim of this work is to provide an alternative hybrid approach, simple and efficient, for the construction of topological maps in indoor environments. For this, the proposal is the combination of two techniques found in the literature, one of them is a technique known as Occupation Grid, and the other is an image skeletonization method used here for topological mapping. Several experiments have been performed for verifying the efficiency of the proposed approach. The results obtained by junction of these two techniques demonstrate that image skeletonization technique is simple and feasible for obtaining the topological lines corresponding to free space of the environment.