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.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figure