An efficient data association approach to simultaneous localization and map building

We present an efficient integer programming (IP) based data association approach to simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). In this approach, the feature based SLAM data association problem is formulated as a 0-1 IP problem. The IP problem is approached by first solving a relaxed linear programming (LP) problem. Based on the optimal LP solution, a suboptimal solution to the IP problem is then obtained by applying an iterative heuristic greedy rounding (IHGR) procedure. Unlike the traditional nearest-neighbor (NN) algorithm, the proposed algorithm deals with a global matching between existing features and measurements of each scan and is more robust for an environment of high density features which is usually the case in outdoor environments. We provide a simulation study where the NN algorithm fails whereas our proposed algorithm performs satisfactorily. Experimental results also demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.