PolySLAM: A 2D Polygon-based SLAM Algorithm

Abstract

Indoor SLAM and exploration is an important topic in robotics. Most solutions today work with a 2D grid representation as map model, both for the internal data format and for the output of the algorithm. While this is convenient in several ways, it also brings its own limitations, in particular because of the memory requirements of this map format. In this paper we introduce PolySLAM, a SLAM algorithm that produces PolyMaps. Our PolyMap utilizes polygons built from vectors to model the environment, and as such this is a special case of vector-based SLAM algorithms. The results of our experiments both in simulation and on real world datasets show that this SLAM is promising. First, maps are more compact which reduces memory consumption compared to standard grid-maps making it attractive for map sharing over wireless connection such as in multi-robots systems. Second, the quality of maps produced by PolySLAM is already good for localization despite the lack of global optimization or loop closure.