Map building with mobile robots in populated environments

Abstract

The problem of generating maps with mobile robots has received considerable attention over the past years. However, most of the approaches assume that the environment is static during the data-acquisition phase. In this paper we consider the problem of creating maps with mobile robots in populated environments. Our approach uses a probabilistic method to track multiple people and to incorporate the results of the tracking technique into the mapping process. The resulting maps are more accurate since corrupted readings are treated accordingly during the matching phase and since the number of spurious objects in the resulting maps is reduced. Our approach has been implemented and tested on real robot systems in indoor and outdoor scenarios. We present several experiments illustrating the capabilities of our approach to generate accurate 2D and 3D maps.