From topological knowledge to geometrical map

The behavioral approach to robot navigation, characterized by a representation of the environment that is topological and robot-environmental interactions that are reactive, is preferable to purely geometrical navigation because it is far more robust against unpredictable changes of the environment. Nevertheless, there is still a need to obtain geometrical maps. This paper considers a geometrical map reconstruction that relies on the topological knowledge and uses redundant odometric measurements taken while the robot moves along the paths of the topological map. Five methods are presented and compared, in experiments involving a Nomad200 mobile robot operating in a real environment.