Maps are “an inexhaustible fund of interest for any man with eyes to see or with two pence worth of imagination to understand with.”
“Here there be dragons.”
Label placed by ancient map-makers for unexplored regions of a map.
A map says to you, “Read me carefully, follow me closely, doubt me not.” It says, “I am the earth in the palm of your hand. Without me, you are alone and lost.”
For autonomous robots, the ability to autonomously create maps of the environment may not, at first glance, seem like a requirement for many tasks. That is, it is sometimes assumed that a robot should be able to take for granted the a priori availability of a map. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case. Not only do architectural blueprints or related types of maps fail to be consistently reliable (since even during construction they are not always updated to reflect necessary alternations), but, furthermore, numerous aspects of an environment are not likely to appear on a map, such as tables, chairs, and transitory objects.
Perhaps equally important, maps usually represent structural elements in some abstract domain (perhaps with semantic labels), while a mobile robot must be able to relate its current location directly to its own perceptions regarding its environment. Maps made for people often depend upon the interpretative skills of the persons using the map and on their ability to make functional inferences, abilities often absent in computational systems.
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