A Survey of Geodetic Approaches to Mapping and the Relationship to Graph-Based SLAM

The ability to simultaneously localize a robot and to build a map of the environment is central to most robotic applications and the problem is often referred to as SLAM. Robotics researchers have proposed a large variety of solutions allowing robots to build maps and use them for navigation. Also the geodetic community addressed large-scale map building for centuries, computing maps which span across continents. These large-scale mapping processes had to deal with several challenges that are similar to those of the robotics community. In this paper, we explain key geodetic map building methods that we believe are relevant for robot mapping. We also aim at providing a geodetic perspective on current state-of-the-art SLAM methods and identifying similarities both in terms of challenges faced as well as in the solutions proposed by both communities. The central goal of this paper is to connect both fields and to enable future synergies between them.