Mapping Techniques for AMPLE, an Autonomous Security Mobile Robot

Abstract

AMPLE is the acronym of the project called Autonomous Mapping of Polluted Environments. This paper introduces the concept of the project and presents some preliminary results of the ongoing research with the final goal of building an autonomous mobile robot that is capable of performing various tasks in unknown environments. To achieve this scope the mapping problem is an ineluctable one. This paper presents a visual mapping system which detects the same Speeded Up Robust Features (SURF) on the stereo pair images in order to obtain three dimensional point clouds at every robot location. The algorithm tracks the displacement of the identical features viewed from different positions to get back the robots positions. Also a mapping algorithm based on the laser system is presented which can detect the dynamic objects that are present in the robots field. The results of an indoor office environment experiments are shown.