Incremental Sparse GP Regression for Continuous-time Trajectory Estimation & Mapping
Abstract
Recent work has investigated the problem of continuous-time trajectory estimation
and mapping for mobile robots by formulating the problem as sparse Gaussian
process regression. Gaussian processes provide a continuous-time representation
of the robot trajectory, which elegantly handles asynchronous and sparse mea-
surements, and allows the robot to query the trajectory to recover it’s estimated
position at any time of interest. One of the major drawbacks of this approach
is that Gaussian process regression formulates continuous-time trajectory estima-
tion as a
batch
estimation problem. In this work, we provide the critical extensions
necessary to transform this existing batch approach into an extremely efficient in-
cremental approach. 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.