Mobile vehicles equipped with range sensing capabilities are well suited for exploring and mapping unknown environments. This paper describes such an exploration platform, based upon an all-terrain skid-steer vehicle and a forward-looking laser rangefinder. Planar range profiles, acquired by the ground-pointing rangefinder along the vehicle path, are used for reactive autonomous navigation and simultaneous 3D mapping. Successive profiles are corrected using inertial data provided by an onboard gyro-clino device and combined to produce a 3D model of the environment, using Delaunay triangulation. Various autonomous navigation modes are available during exploration. The platform has been extensively tested in indoor and outdoor environments.
['Thomas Gerbaud', 'Vladimir Polotski', 'Paul Cohen']
Simultaneous exploration and 3D mapping of unstructured environments