BS-SLAM: Shaping the World

This paper presents BS-SLAM, a simultaneous localization and mapping algorithm for use in unstructured environments that is effective regardless of whether features correspond to simple geometric primitives such as lines or not. The coordinates of the control points defining a set of B-splines are used to form a complete and compact description of the environment, thus making it feasible to use an extended Kalman filter based SLAM algorithm. The proposed method is the first known EKF-SLAM implementation capable of describing both straight and curve features in a parametric way. Appropriate observation equation that allows the exploitation of virtually all observations from a range sensor such as the ubiquitous laser range finder is developed. Efficient strategies for computing the relevant Jacobians, perform data association, initialization and expanding the map are presented. The effectiveness of the algorithms is demonstrated using experimental data.