RI Homepage Carnegie Mellon Homepage RI Homepage

The Robotics Institute

Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute

Efficient Construction of Globally Consistent Ladar Maps using Pose Network Topology and Nonlinear Programming

Alonzo Kelly and Ranjith Unnikrishnan
Proceedings of the 11th International Symposium of Robotics Research (ISRR '03), November, 2003.


Download
  • Adobe portable document format (pdf) (615KB)
Copyright notice: This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. These works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

Abstract
Many instances of the mobile robot guidance mapping problem exhibit a topology that can be represented as a graph of nodes (observations) connected by edges (poses). We show that a cycle basis of this pose network can be used to generate the independent constraint equations in a natural constrained optimization formulation of the mapping problem. Explicit reasoning about the loop topology of the network can automatically generate such a cycle basis in linear time. Furthermore, in many practical cases, the pose network has sparse structure and the associated equations can then be solved time linear in the number of images. This approach can be used to construct globally consistent maps on very large scales in very limited computation. While the technique is applicable to mapbuilding in general, and even optimization in general, it is illustrated here for batch processing of 2D ladar scans into a mobile robot guidance map.

Notes
Associated Center(s) / Consortia: National Robotics Engineering Center
Number of pages: 10

Text Reference
Alonzo Kelly and Ranjith Unnikrishnan, "Efficient Construction of Globally Consistent Ladar Maps using Pose Network Topology and Nonlinear Programming," Proceedings of the 11th International Symposium of Robotics Research (ISRR '03), November, 2003.

BibTeX Reference
@inproceedings{Kelly_2003_4587,
   author = "Alonzo Kelly and Ranjith Unnikrishnan",
   title = "Efficient Construction of Globally Consistent Ladar Maps using Pose Network Topology and Nonlinear Programming",
   booktitle = "Proceedings of the 11th International Symposium of Robotics Research (ISRR '03)",
   month = "November",
   year = "2003",
}

The Robotics Institute is part of the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University.
Contact Us | Update Instructions