Autonomous navigation of a mobile robot is a challenging task which requires ability of mapping, localization, path planning and path following. Conventional mapping methods build a dense metric map like an occupancy grid, which is affected by odometry error accumulation and consumes a lot of memory and computations in large environments. Another approach to mapping is the usage of topological properties, e.g. adjacency of locations in the environment. Topological maps are less prone to odometry error accumulation and high resources consumption, and also enable fast path planning because of the graph sparsity. Based on this idea, we proposed NavTopo – a full navigation pipeline based on topological map and two-level path planning. The pipeline localizes in the graph by matching neural network descriptors and 2D projections of the input point clouds, which significantly reduces memory consumption compared to metric and topological point cloud-based approaches. We test our approach in three large indoor photo-relaistic simulated environments and compare it to a metric map-based approach based on popular metric mapping method RTAB-MAP. The experimental results show that our topological approach significantly outperforms the metric one in terms of performance with 8 times less memory usage and two orders less path planning time, keeping proper navigational efficiency.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-71360-6_11
Download PDF at Springer: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-71360-6_11
Download PDF at arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.11492
Kirill Muravyev, Konstantin Yakovlev. NavTopo: Leveraging Topological Maps for Autonomous Navigation of a Mobile Robot // Interactive Collaborative Robotics. ICR 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 14898, 2024. Pp. 144–157.