Occupancy grid mapping

Occupancy Grid Mapping refers to a family of computer algorithms in probabilistic robotics for mobile robots which address the problem of generating maps from noisy and uncertain sensor measurement data, with the assumption that the robot pose is known. Occupancy grids were first proposed by H. Moravec and A. Elfes in 1985.

The basic idea of the occupancy grid is to represent a map of the environment as an evenly spaced field of binary random variables each representing the presence of an obstacle at that location in the environment. Occupancy grid algorithms compute approximate posterior estimates for these random variables.