A control theoretic formulation of the generalized SLAM problem in robotics

Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) has emerged as a key capability for autonomous mobile robots navigating in unknown environments. The basic idea behind SLAM is to concurrently obtain a map of the environment and an estimate of where the robot is placed within this map. In other words, the map and the robot's pose have to be estimated at the same time, given the same data set. This paper revisits this problem from a control theoretic vantage point by reformulating the SLAM problem as a problem of simultaneously estimating the state and the output map of a controlled, dynamical system. What is different with this formulation is that the map is contained in the output map and not, as previously done, in the state of the system.