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Exploration Without Global Consistency Using Local Volume Consolidation

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Robotics Research (ISRR 2019)

Part of the book series: Springer Proceedings in Advanced Robotics ((SPAR,volume 20))

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Abstract

In exploration, the goal is to build a map of an unknown environment. Most state-of-the-art approaches use map representations that require drift-free state estimates to function properly. Real-world state estimators, however, exhibit drift. In this paper, we present a 2D map representation for exploration that is robust to drift. Rather than a global map, it uses local metric volumes connected by relative pose estimates. This pose-graph does not need to be globally consistent. Overlaps between the volumes are resolved locally, rather than on the faulty estimate of space. We demonstrate our representation with a frontier-based exploration approach, evaluate it under different conditions and compare it with a commonly-used grid-based representation. We show that, at the cost of longer exploration time, using the proposed representation allows full coverage of space even for very large drift in the state estimate, contrary to the grid-based representation. The system is validated in a real world experiment and we discuss its extension to 3D.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Trivial exceptions, such as disconnected free space, are omitted for brevity.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) Robotics through the Swiss National Science Foundation and the SNSF-ERC Starting Grant.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Robotics and Perception Group, Department of Informatics and Neuroinformatics, University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Titus Cieslewski, Andreas Ziegler & Davide Scaramuzza

Authors
  1. Titus Cieslewski
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  2. Andreas Ziegler
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  3. Davide Scaramuzza
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Titus Cieslewski .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Anthropomatics and Robotics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Baden-Württemberg, Germany

    Tamim Asfour

  2. Department of Information Technology and Human Factors, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Tsukuba, Japan

    Eiichi Yoshida

  3. Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea (Republic of)

    Jaeheung Park

  4. Jacobs School of Engineering, Institute for Contextual Robotics, San Diego, CA, USA

    Henrik Christensen

  5. Department of Computer Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Oussama Khatib

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Cieslewski, T., Ziegler, A., Scaramuzza, D. (2022). Exploration Without Global Consistency Using Local Volume Consolidation. In: Asfour, T., Yoshida, E., Park, J., Christensen, H., Khatib, O. (eds) Robotics Research. ISRR 2019. Springer Proceedings in Advanced Robotics, vol 20. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95459-8_34

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