A compact spherical RGBD keyframe-based representation

This paper proposes an environmental representation approach based on hybrid metric and topological maps as a key component for mobile robot navigation. Focus is made on an ego-centric pose graph structure by the use of Keyframes to capture the local properties of the scene. With the aim of reducing data redundancy, suppress sensor noise whilst maintaining a dense compact representation of the environment, neighbouring augmented spheres are fused in a single representation. To this end, an uncertainty error model propagation is formulated for outlier rejection and data fusion, enhanced with the notion of landmark stability over time. Finally, our algorithm is tested thoroughly on a newly developed wide angle 360° field of view (FOV) spherical sensor where improvements such as trajectory drift, compactness and reduced tracking error are demonstrated.