Sphere-Graph: A Compact 3D Topological Map for Robotic Navigation and Segmentation of Complex Environments

Topological maps are a common framework for enabling autonomous robotic navigation. To be effective for robotic exploration the maps must be able to be generated quickly and compact enough to store on lightweight hardware. Here we propose a novel 3D topological map called Sphere-Graph which has adaptive edge lengths, can be quickly generated, and can be used to semantically identify hallways and rooms to produce a compact representation of complex environments. We give examples of the Sphere-Graph representation of large 3D urban and cave environments.