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arXiv · 2303.02076

Graph-based Global Robot Localization Informing Situational Graphs with Architectural Graphs

Muhammad Shaheer·Jose Andres Millan-Romera·Hriday Bavle·Jose Luis Sanchez-Lopez·Javier Civera·Holger Voos
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Abstract

In this paper, we propose a solution for legged robot localization using architectural plans. Our specific contributions towards this goal are several. Firstly, we develop a method for converting the plan of a building into what we denote as an architectural graph (A-Graph). When the robot starts moving in an environment, we assume it has no knowledge about it, and it estimates an online situational graph representation (S-Graph) of its surroundings. We develop a novel graph-to-graph matching method, in order to relate the S-Graph estimated online from the robot sensors and the A-Graph extracted from the building plans. Note the challenge in this, as the S-Graph may show a partial view of the full A-Graph, their nodes are heterogeneous and their reference frames are different. After the matching, both graphs are aligned and merged, resulting in what we denote as an informed Situational Graph (iS-Graph), with which we achieve global robot localization and exploitation of prior knowledge from the building plans. Our experiments show that our pipeline shows a higher robustness and a significantly lower pose error than several LiDAR localization baselines.

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Muhammad Shaheer, Jose Andres Millan-Romera, Hriday Bavle, Jose Luis Sanchez-Lopez, Javier Civera, Holger Voos. 2023-03-03. Graph-based Global Robot Localization Informing Situational Graphs with Architectural Graphs. https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.02076

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