Multi-robot SLAM with Unknown Initial Correspondence: The Robot Rendezvous Case

Abstract— This paper presents a new approach to the multirobot map-alignment problem that enables teams of robots to build joint maps without initial knowledge of their relative poses. The key contribution of this work is an optimal algorithm for merging (not necessarily overlapping) maps that are created by different robots independently. Relative pose measurements between pairs of robots are processed to compute the coordinate transformation between any two maps. Noise in the robotto-robot observations, propagated through the map-alignment process, increases the error in the position estimates of the transformed landmarks, and reduces the overall accuracy of the merged map. When there is overlap between the two maps, landmarks that appear twice provide additional information, in the form of constraints, which increases the alignment accuracy. Landmark duplicates are identified through a fast nearestneighbor matching algorithm. In order to reduce the computational complexity of thi...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: IROS
• Authors: Xun S. Zhou, Stergios I. Roumeliotis
• Keywords: IROS 2006, Multirobot Map-alignment Problem, Relative Pose, Robotics, Robots