Laser and vision based map building techniques for mobile robot navigation

We presents some preliminary results of the ongoing research with the final goal of building an autonomous mobile robot. 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. The Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm is used to register the obtained landmarks in the feature based map of the entire environment. 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.