Incremental Sparse GP Regression for Continuous-time Trajectory Estimation & Mapping

TL;DR

This paper introduces an efficient incremental Gaussian process-based method for continuous-time trajectory estimation and mapping in mobile robots, improving speed and practicality over traditional batch approaches.

Contribution

It extends batch Gaussian process trajectory estimation to an incremental framework using variable reordering and sparse updates, enhancing efficiency for real-time robot mapping.

Findings

Significantly faster solution times with incremental updates.

Effective handling of asynchronous and sparse measurements.

Validated on synthetic and real datasets.

Abstract

Recent work on simultaneous trajectory estimation and mapping (STEAM) for mobile robots has found success by representing the trajectory as a Gaussian process. Gaussian processes can represent a continuous-time trajectory, elegantly handle asynchronous and sparse measurements, and allow the robot to query the trajectory to recover its estimated position at any time of interest. A major drawback of this approach is that STEAM is formulated as a batch estimation problem. In this paper we provide the critical extensions necessary to transform the existing batch algorithm into an extremely efficient incremental algorithm. In particular, we are able to vastly speed up the solution time through efficient variable reordering and incremental sparse updates, which we believe will greatly increase the practicality of Gaussian process methods for robot mapping and localization. Finally, we demonstrate the approach and its advantages on both synthetic and real datasets.