Hierarchies of Octrees for Efficient 3D Mapping

Abstract — In this paper, we present a novel multi-resolution approach to efficiently mapping 3D environments. Our repre-sentation models the environment as a hierarchy of probabilistic 3D maps, in which each submap is updated and transformed individually. In addition to the formal description of the approach, we present an implementation for tabletop manip-ulation tasks and an information-driven exploration algorithm for autonomously building a hierarchical map from sensor data. We evaluate our approach using real-world as well as simulated data. The results demonstrate that our method is able to efficiently represent 3D environments at high levels of detail. Compared to a monolithic approach, our maps can be generated significantly faster while requiring significantly less memory. I