Anytime merging of appearance-based maps
We consider the problem of merging together multiple appearance-based maps independently built by a team of robots jointly exploring an indoor environment. Due to the lack of accepted metrics to evaluate the quality of merged appearance-based maps, we propose to use algebraic connectivity for this purpose, and we discuss why this is an appropriate measure. Next, we introduce QuickConnect, an anytime algorithm aiming to maximize the given metric and we show how it can merge couple of maps, as well as multiple maps at the same time. The proposed algorithm has been implemented and tested on a fully functioning robotic system building appearance-based maps using a bag of words approach. QuickConnect outperforms alternative methods and features a convenient tradeoff between accuracy and speed.
appearance-based maps map merging multi-robot systems