Topological Mapping

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Overview

Topological mapping studies how to represent which places or regions connect, so robots and learned models can reason about routes and structure without requiring a perfectly precise metric map. Common approaches build graphs from RGB or RGB-D observations, point clouds, or costmaps, often adding semantic landmarks, geometric priors, loop closures, and multiple localization hypotheses. Researchers evaluate these maps on indoor and outdoor navigation, road-network connectivity, and dimensionality-reduction benchmarks, measuring localization, route success, and preservation of topology. A central challenge is balancing compact, robust maps against fine geometric detail, especially when perceptual ambiguity, environmental change, or unfamiliar locations can break connectivity estimates.

Latest papers

CardsList

25 papers5 papers in the last four weeks, against 1 the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

  1. AVALON: Zero-Shot Indoor Navigation with Human-Seeded Topological Memory

    Oct 15, 2026Jing Xia, Changyan Li, Yuduo Wang +5Robot NavigationIndoor Robot Navigation

    Department of Data and Systems Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China. · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China.

  2. NFMap: Topographic 2D Manifold Learning with Invertible Normalizing Flows

    Oct 12, 2026Héléna Alexandra GasparDimensionality ReductionManifold Learning

    LovingScience 124 City Road, London EC1V 2NX

  3. STAG: A Sparse Traversability-Aware Graph Representation from Grid-Based Costmaps for Robotic Navigation

    Oct 8, 2026Gabriel Manuel Garcia, Stéphanie Aravecchia, Miguel Angel Olivares-MendezRobot NavigationGraph-Based Planning

    University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg · IRL Georgia Tech-CNRS, Metz, France

  4. Refine Connections, Close the Gap: A Reliable Enhancement Framework for Driving Scene Topology

    Oct 8, 2026Xiaoqi Wang, Dingyi Zhuang, David Paz +6Topological MappingAutonomous Driving

    Bosch Research North America · Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence (BCAI) · Massachusetts Institute of Technology +1

  5. BatSLAM 2.0: Sequence-Verified Sonar Place Recognition in a Robust Pose Graph

    Sep 30, 2026Jan SteckelSimultaneous Localization and MappingLoop Closure Detection

    Cosys-Lab, Faculty of Applied Engineering, University of Antwerp, 2020 Antwerp, Belgium · Flanders Make Strategic Research Centre, 3920 Lommel, Belgium

  6. BronchoTop: Bronchoscopy Navigation via RGB-Only Topological Localization

    Sep 23, 2026Clara Tomasini, Ana Cristina Murillo, Luis RiazueloEndoscopyMap-Based Localization

    DIIS - I3A - Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain

  7. RAEM: Robust Autonomous Exploration for Multi-Floor Environments with a Quadruped Robot

    Aug 26, 2026Zikang Yuan, Yuan Ren, Yian Wang +10Autonomous Robot ExplorationRobot Navigation

    AI Chip Center for Emerging Smart Systems, InnoHK Centers, Hong Kong Science Park, Hong Kong, China · HongKong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China · Southeast University, Nanjing, China +4

  8. Beyond Uniform Local Isometry and Topology: FactoMap for Disentangled Representations

    Aug 25, 2026Sohini Gupta, Michael Gao, Bahareh TolooshamsDisentangled Representation LearningLatent Space Geometry

    University of Alberta Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii) · University of Alberta Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii) Canada CIFAR AI Chair

  9. Unordered Landmark Visual Navigation

    Aug 7, 2026Hao Ren, Junzhe Zhu, Yihan Li +8Visual NavigationRobot Navigation

    Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China · Insta360 Research, Shenzhen, China

  10. SSTG-Nav: Metric-Grounded Spatial-Semantic Topological Graphs for Reusable Object Navigation

    Aug 1, 2026Daojie Peng, Bingtao Wang, Jun MaSemantic MappingObject-Goal Navigation

    The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) · Shandong University

  11. HGeo-TopoMap: Boosting Topological Mapping with Hierarchical Geometric Priors

    Jul 23, 2026Siyu Li, Kunyu Peng, Di Wen +3HD Map ConstructionAutonomous Driving Perception

    The authors are with the School of Automation and Electrical Engineering, Zhejiang University of Science and Technology, China. · The authors are with the Institute for Anthropomatics and Robotics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany. · The authors are with the School of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics and the National Engineering Research Center of Robot Visual Perception and Control Technology, Hunan University, China

  12. PixelLoop: Shortcut Topological Navigation with Pixel-Level Loops

    Jul 14, 2026Sarthak Chittawar, Vansh Garg, Aditya Vadali +4Robot NavigationLoop Closure Detection

    Robotics Research Center, IIIT-Hyderabad, India

  13. SLIDER: Sparse History-Guided Aerial Robot Target Search using Sliding Local Maps

    Jul 12, 2026Xiaolei Hou, Zheng Pan, Hua Lan +6Aerial RoboticsRobot Navigation

  14. MapDreamer: Aerial Imagery Conditioned Latent Diffusion for Lane-Level Map Generation

    Jul 1, 2026Julian Brandes, Philipp Crocoll, Wolfram BurgardHD Map ConstructionLatent Diffusion Models

    Department CSAI at University of Technology Nuremberg, Nuremberg, Germany · Robert Bosch GmbH, Stuttgart

  15. Constructing VAE Latent Spaces with Prescribed Topology

    Jun 5, 2026Jilles S. van Hulst, Jakub M. Tomczak, W. P. M. H. Heemels +1Variational AutoencodersManifold Learning

    Control Systems Technology Section, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology, 5600 MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands. · The research is carried out as part of the ITEA4 20216 ASIMOV project.

  16. PlatonicNav: Unveiling Semantic Correspondence in Navigation with Platonic Topological Maps

    Jun 1, 2026Junlin Long, Zeyu Zhang, Xu Deng +5Embodied NavigationVision-Language Navigation

    1USYD · 2Maincode · 3UNSW +1

  17. A Topological Characterization of Graph Neural Networks via Stochastic Block Model Embeddings on the n-Sphere

    May 29, 2026Gopal AnantharamanGraphon TheoryGraph Neural Networks

    KnotTheory.ai Inc. · Dept. of Mathematics, Emporia State University

  18. Palm-sized Omnidirectional Vision-Based UAV Exploration with Sparse Topological Map Guidance

    May 8, 2026Zirui Wang, Xinjia Luo, Haotian Sun +3Robot NavigationUAV Navigation

    Department of Mechanical and Energy Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, 518055, China

  19. Change-Robust Online Spatial-Semantic Topological Mapping

    May 4, 2026Jiaming Wang, Jizhuo Chen, Diwen Liu +4Robot NavigationSemantic Mapping

    National University of Singapore

  20. DiRe-RAPIDS: Topology-faithful dimensionality reduction at scale

    Apr 28, 2026Alexander Kolpakov, Igor RivinData VisualizationManifold Learning

    CSTEM, University of Austin, Austin, TX, USA · Department of Mathematics, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA

  21. Passage-Aware Structural Mapping for RGB-D Visual SLAM

    Apr 27, 2026Ali Tourani, Miguel Fernandez-Cortizas, Saad Ejaz +4Visual SLAMSemantic Mapping

    Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability, and Trust (SnT), University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg. · Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain. · Faculty of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg.

  22. GIST: Multimodal Knowledge Extraction and Spatial Grounding via Intelligent Semantic Topology

    Apr 16, 2026Shivendra Agrawal, Bradley HayesMultimodal GroundingEmbodied Navigation

    University of Colorado Boulder · Boulder, Colorado, USA

  23. Self-Organizing Maps with Optimized Latent Positions

    Apr 15, 2026Seiki Ubukata, Akira Notsu, Katsuhiro HondaSelf-Organizing MapsTopological Mapping

    Graduate School of Informatics, Osaka Metropolitan University, Osaka 599-8531, Japan · Graduate School of Sustainable System Sciences, Osaka Metropolitan University, Osaka 599-8531, Japan

  24. TopoMaskV3: 3D Mask Head with Dense Offset and Height Predictions for Road Topology Understanding

    Mar 2, 2026Muhammet Esat Kalfaoglu, Halil Ibrahim Ozturk, Ozsel Kilinc +1Topological Mapping3D Scene Understanding

    Graduate School of Informatics, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey · Togg/Trutek AI Team, Ankara, Turkey

  25. TOPO-Bench: An Open-Source Topological Mapping Evaluation Framework with Quantifiable Perceptual Aliasing

    Oct 5, 2025Jiaming Wang, Jizhuo Chen, Diwen Liu +1Benchmark DesignMap-Based Localization