Polar Map: A Digital Representation of Closed Structures for Underwater Robotic Inspection

This article presents a novel 2.5D map representation, termed polar map, that has a memory consumption of O(ML), where M and L depend on the map's angular and depth resolution, respectively. The map has a computational effort of O(1) in the update and evaluation process, where updates are performed through the use of Kalman filters. The representation can only be applied to structures in an environment that can be represented uniquely in a...