Map evaluation using matched topology graphs

作者：Schwertfeger, Soren^*; Birk, Andreas

来源：Autonomous Robots, 2016, 40(5): 761-787.

DOI：10.1007/s10514-015-9493-5

• Mobile robot
• Performance metric
• Map quality
• Ground truth comparison
• Topology
• Place recognition
• Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM)

Mapping is an important task for mobile robots. The assessment of the quality of maps in a simple, efficient and automated way is not trivial and an ongoing research topic. Here, a new approach for the evaluation of 2D grid maps is presented. This structure-based method makes use of a topology graph, i.e., a topological representation that includes abstracted local metric information. It is shown how the topology graph is constructed from a Voronoi diagram that is pruned and simplified such that only high level topological information remains to concentrate on larger, topologically distinctive places. Several methods for computing the similarity of vertices in two topology graphs, i.e., for performing a place-recognition, are presented. Based on the similarities, it is shown how subgraph-isomorphisms can be efficiently computed and two topology graphs can be matched. The match between the graphs is then used to calculate a number of standard map evaluation attributes like coverage, global accuracy, relative accuracy, consistency, and brokenness. Experiments with robot generated maps are used to highlight the capabilities of the proposed approach and to evaluate the performance of the underlying algorithms.

• 出版日期2016-6
• 单位上海科技大学