An hybrid representation well-adapted to the exploration of large scale indoors environments

This paper presents a new methodology for large scale environment modelling by mobile robots. The model of the indoor environment is structured as an hybrid representation, both topological and geometrical, which is incrementally built during the exploration task. The topological aspect of the model captures the connectivity and accessibility of the different places in the environment, and the geometrical model supports a precise robot localization method and a map building of the free space. Experiments are shown which confirm the advantages of merging the topology and metrics of the environment in an hybrid model.