An effective laser-based approach to build topological map of unknown environment

To obtain the information of unknown environment as sufficient and fast as possible, this paper proposed an effective approach to build a local topological map of unknown environment. The laser data obtained by laser sensor is successfully transformed into a local grid map refined by Bayesian rule and subsequently a skeleton of the free area in the generated local grid map is extracted via an improved skeleton algorithm which was also proposed in this article. In addition, a set of topological node selection rules on the previous extracted skeleton are carefully designed, and the generated node group is organized into a tree data structure. Thus the local topological map is established based on the laser data in unknown environment. As demonstrated from experimental results, the proposed approach is effective to reveal genuine structure of the robot´s environment.