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Gaussian processes autonomous mapping and exploration for range-sensing mobile robots

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Abstract

Most of the existing robotic exploration schemes use occupancy grid representations and geometric targets known as frontiers. The occupancy grid representation relies on the assumption of independence between grid cells and ignores structural correlations present in the environment. We develop a Gaussian processes (GPs) occupancy mapping technique that is computationally tractable for online map building due to its incremental formulation and provides a continuous model of uncertainty over the map spatial coordinates. The standard way to represent geometric frontiers extracted from occupancy maps is to assign binary values to each grid cell. We extend this notion to novel probabilistic frontier maps computed efficiently using the gradient of the GP occupancy map. We also propose a mutual information-based greedy exploration technique built on that representation that takes into account all possible future observations. A major advantage of high-dimensional map inference is the fact that such techniques require fewer observations, leading to a faster map entropy reduction during exploration for map building scenarios. Evaluations using the publicly available datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed framework for robotic mapping and exploration tasks.

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Notes

  1. The required localization accuracy is subject to the specific application.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Perceptual Robotics Laboratory, Department of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, 48109, USA

    Maani Ghaffari Jadidi

  2. Centre for Autonomous Systems, University of Technology Sydney, P.O. Box 123, Broadway, NSW, 2007, Australia

    Jaime Valls Miro & Gamini Dissanayake

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  1. Maani Ghaffari Jadidi
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  2. Jaime Valls Miro
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  3. Gamini Dissanayake
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Correspondence to Maani Ghaffari Jadidi.

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This is one of the several papers published in Autonomous Robots comprising the Special Issue on Active Perception.

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Ghaffari Jadidi, M., Valls Miro, J. & Dissanayake, G. Gaussian processes autonomous mapping and exploration for range-sensing mobile robots. Auton Robot 42, 273–290 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10514-017-9668-3

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