Pure Topological Mapping in Mobile Robotics

In this paper, we investigate a pure form of the topological mapping problem in mobile robotics. We consider the mapping ability of a robot navigating a graph-like world in which it is able to assign a relative ordering to the edges, leaving a vertex with reference to the edge by which it arrived but is unable to associate a unique label with any vertex or edge. Our work extends and builds upon earlier approaches in this problem domain, which are based on construction of exploration tree of plausible world models. The main contributions of the paper are improved exploration strategies that reduce model ambiguity, a new method of search through consistent models in the exploration tree that maintains a bounded set of likely hypotheses based on the principle of Occam's Razor, the incorporation of arbitrary feature vectors into the problem formulation, and an investigation of various aspects of this problem through numerical simulations.