Map building with mobile robots in dynamic environments

The problem of generating maps with mobile robots has received considerable attention over the past years. Most of the techniques developed so far have been designed for situations in which the environment is static during the mapping process. Dynamic objects, however, can lead to serious errors in the resulting maps such as spurious objects or misalignments due to localization errors. In this paper we consider the problem of creating maps with mobile robots in dynamic environments. We present a new approach that interleaves mapping and localization with a probabilistic technique to identify spurious measurements. In several experiments we demonstrate that our algorithm generates accurate 2d and 3d in different kinds of dynamic indoor and outdoor environments. We also use our algorithm to isolate the dynamic objects and to generate three-dimensional representation of them.