Autonomous Navigation Based on a Novel Topological Map

A novel topological map is proposed in this paper. By virtue of the topological map whose nodes are represented with the range finderpsilas free beams together with the visual scale-invariant features, the mobile robot can autonomously navigates in unknown, large-scale and indoor environments. Different from the traditional navigation methods that rely on accurate global localization, the robot locates itself imprecisely by location recognition rather than calculating its global pose in the world reference frame. By combining the reactive navigational method, BCM, with the topological map, a smooth, real-time navigation without global localization can be realized.