Comparison of mapping techniques in appearance-based topological maps creation

In this paper we compare two methods to carry out topological mapping using only visual information captured by a robot. This map should contain enough information so that the robot can estimate its position and orientation and redundant information should be removed to get an acceptable computational cost during the localization process. Apart from this, it is also important to know the topology of the map created since it will make possible a high-level planification of the path to move to the target points. We propose to build this topological map only using the panoramic images taken by an omnidirectional vision system and using appearance-based methods. We have carried out an exhaustive experimentation to study the validity of the proposed methods and to perform an objective comparison between them. Also, we have tested the processing time to create the topological map.