Learning Topological Maps: An Alternative Approach

Arno Bücken, Sebastian Thrun

Abstract: Our goal is autonomous real-time control of a mobile robot. In this paper we want to show a possibility to learn topological maps of a large-scale indoor environment autonomously. In the literature there are two paradigms how to store information on the environment of a robot: as a grid-based (geometric) or as a topological map. While grid-based maps are considerably easy to learn and maintain, topological maps are quite compact and facilitate fast motionplanning.