Temporal Occupancy Grid for mobile robot dynamic environment mapping

Abstract

Mapping dynamic environments is an open issue in the field of robotics. In this paper, we extend the well known Occupancy Grid structure to address the problem of generating valid maps for dynamic indoor environments. We propose a spatiotemporal access method to store all sensor values (instead of preserving only one value for each cell as in the common occupancy grid case). By searching for similar time series, we can detect moving objects that appear only in a limited number of possible configurations (e.g. doors or chairs). Simulated experiments demonstrate the potentialities of the proposed system.