Building a global map of the environment of a mobile robot: the importance of correlations

The work presented in this paper is aimed at evaluating the influence of correlations between map entities on the process of robot relocation and global map building of the environment of a mobile robot navigating in an indoor environment. An EKF filter approach, supported by a probabilistic model to represent uncertain geometric information, is used to process the information obtained by the sensors mounted on the robot. We have developed two approaches, first, considering the existence of correlations, and second assuming independence between entities of the map. We have experimented with the mobile robot MACROBE, using its laser rangefinder.

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