Multiellipsoidal Mapping Algorithm

Abstract

The robotic mapping problem, which consists in providing a spatial model of the environment to a robot, is a research topic with a wide range of applications. One important challenge of this problem is to obtain a map that is information-rich (i.e., a map that preserves main structures of the environment and object shapes) yet still has a low memory cost. Point clouds offer a highly descriptive and information-rich environmental representation; accordingly, many algorithms have been developed to approximate point clouds and lower the memory cost. In recent years, approaches using basic and “simple” (i.e., using only planes or spheres) geometric entities for approximating point clouds have been shown to provide accurate representations at low memory cost. However, a better approximation can be implemented if more complex geometric entities are used. In the present paper, a new object-mapping algorithm is introduced for approximating point clouds with multiple ellipsoids and other quadratic surfaces. We show that this algorithm creates maps that are rich in information yet low in memory cost and have features suitable for other robotics problems such as navigation and pose estimation.