Realtime perception with infrared scanner for navigation of quadruped walking and climbing robot

When a robot navigates in the unstructured environment, it frequently meets various objects capable of being represented as a simple geometrical primitives such as planes, spheres, cylinders, and their combinations. In this paper, we propose a method for the perception of the environment with a low cost two degree-of-freedom IR (infrared) scanner, which can be used for navigation of the quadruped walking robot. Our work is mainly focused on the development of an algorithm for real-time modeling of the environment and the shape reconstruction of the environment. Though the proposed algorithm is very simple, it is useful to determine the geometrical features of the object as well as provide sufficient information for navigation of the robot. Using the proposed method, a method for gait control of the quadruped walking robot can be generated. The validity of the proposed algorithms are demonstrated through experiments using a quadruped walking robot called "MRWALLSPECT III(Multifunctional Robot for WALL inSPECTion version 3)".