Topo-Geometric Mapping Based on Voronoi Diagrams and Bounding Polygons

Mobile robots are nowadays thought as a helping tool for indoor tasks. Hence, their capabilities for navigating are essential. Most of the time, those capabilities rely on a previously acquired model of the environment, which should be accurate to assure safety on the robot's calculated plans and simple enough to allow real-time computations. This paper presents a topo-geometric map based on Voronoi diagrams and bounding polygons. Its aims are to simplify an original occupancy grid map and to ease the connection with information of diverse abstraction levels for robust indoor navigation tasks. The novelty of this representation method relies on the use of Voronoi diagrams as a modeling strategy, applied to both occupied and unoccupied areas. Inverse and direct Voronoi diagrams are created, corresponding to elements found in the environment and traversable areas, respectively. Several experiments have been carried out in indoor scenarios, showing its performance.