A geometrical sonar maps for mobile robots

The purpose of this study is to build and manage environment models with line segments from sonar range data for obstacles in unknown and varied environments. The proposed method subsequently employs a two-stage data-transform process in order to extract environmental line segments from range data of obstacles. In the first stage the sonar data is accumulated to a local histogram grid. In the second stage the local histogram grid is mapped to a line histogram by Hough transform. New line segments can be found at maximum density cells in the line histogram and they are composed to the global line segments map. The proposed technique is illustrated by experiments in an indoor environment