Drivable road region detection using a single laser range finder for outdoor patrol robots

For outdoor navigation, it is necessary to find the relevant features of outdoor road environments and detect drivable region for robot´s motion. This paper presents a methodology for extracting the drivable road region by detecting the prominent road features and obstacles through a single laser range finder. The prominent features of roads are curbs and the road surface. The laser range finder is mounted on the mobile robot, looks down the road with a small tilt angle, and obtains two-dimensional range data. The proposed method is computationally more efficient in comparison with vision-based techniques and applicable for various road conditions in target environment. Experimental results confirm the reliability of the algorithm.