Hierarchies of probabilistic models of navigation: the Bayesian Map and the Abstraction operator

This paper presents a new method for probabilistic modeling of space, called the Bayesian Map formalism. It offers a generalization of some common approaches found in the literature, as it does not constrain the dependency structure of the probabilistic model. The formalism allows incremental building of hierarchies of models, by the use of the Abstraction operator. In the resulting hierarchy, localization in the high level model is based on probabilistic competition of the lower level models. Experimental results validate the concept, and hint at its usefulness for large scale scenarios.