Area Graph: Generation of Topological Maps using the Voronoi Diagram
This addresses the need for efficient map representation in robotics, enabling reduced storage and computation for tasks like path planning, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing Voronoi Graph methods.
The paper tackles the problem of generating topological maps from scanned environments by introducing the Area Graph, which uses a pruned Voronoi Graph and room detection to represent areas and passages, claiming superiority over state-of-the-art methods in complex indoor environments based on experimental results.
Representing a scanned map of the real environment as a topological structure is an important research topic in robotics. Since topological representations of maps save a huge amount of map storage space and online computing time, they are widely used in fields such as path planning, map matching, and semantic mapping. We use a topological map representation, the Area Graph, in which the vertices represent areas and edges represent passages. The Area Graph is developed from a pruned Voronoi Graph, the Topology Graph. We also employ a simple room detection algorithm to compensate the fact that the Voronoi Graph gets unstable in open areas. We claim that our area segmentation method is superior to state-of-the-art approaches in complex indoor environments and support this claim with a number of experiments.