A new observation model for B-Spline SLAM

Abstract

Recently, a novel laser data based SLAM algorithm using B-Spline as features has been developed in [Pedraza et al., 2007]. EKF is used in the proposed BS-SLAM algorithm and the state vector contains the current robot pose together with the control oints of the splines. The obervation model used for the EKF update is the intersections of the laser beams with the splines contained in the map. In this paper, we propose a new observation model for B-Spline SLAM. By properly defining the control pointsfor the splines, the observation model can be expressed as a function of relative positions between control points and the robot pose, which is the same format as what used in point feature based SLAM. This new observation model make it possible to apply optimization based techniques to B-Spline SLAM, which has the potential to resolve the inconsistency issues of B-Spline SLAM.