How to learn accurate grid maps with a humanoid

Humanoids have recently become a popular research platform in the robotics community. Such robots offer various fields for new applications. However, they have several drawbacks compared to wheeled vehicles such as stability problems, limited payload capabilities, violation of the flat world assumption, and they typically provide only very rough odometry information, if at all. In this paper, we investigate the problem of learning accurate grid maps with humanoid robots. We present techniques to deal with some of the above-mentioned difficulties. We describe how an existing approach to the simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) problem can be adapted to robustly learn accurate maps with a humanoid equipped with a laser range finder. We present an experiment in which our mapping system builds a highly accurate map with a size of around 20m by 20m using data acquired with a humanoid in our office environment containing two loops. The resulting maps have a similar accuracy as maps built with a wheeled robot. ©2008 IEEE