Long-term experiment using an adaptive appearance-based map for visual navigation by mobile robots

Building functional and useful mobile service robots means that these robots have to be able to share physical spaces with humans, and to update their internal representation of the world in response to changes in the arrangement of objects and appearance of the environment - changes that may be spontaneous and unpredictable - as a result of human activities. However, almost all past research on robot mapping addresses only the initial learning of an environment, a phase which will only be a short moment in the lifetime of a service robot that may be expected to operate for many years.