Summary
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Most work in mobile robotics focuses on robots moving in the
plane. There are good reasons for that because building floors are
planar, wheeled robots cannot move vertically and the most popular
sensor nowadays scans a planar slice of the environment with a laser
beam. While a 2-D approach may be adequate for indoor service robotics
there are some worthwhile applications that require both 3-D motion
and perception. Applications are extraterrestrial, underwater, mine or
cave exploration, and searching for earthquake victims in the rubble
pile of a collapsed building. Here the environment is highly
unstructured requiring the robot to crawl through a three-dimensional
tunnel of rubble. This project aims at using a walking robot to create
a 3-D representation of such environments and to aggregate this
representation into a map. Computer vision shall be used to perceive
the environment combined with proprioceptive information on the
robot's movement. While vision allows to perceive 3D environmental
features, the project's main focus is on integrating these features
into a consistent spatial representation by modeling their
uncertainty statistically. Recent progress both in the design of
walking robots and in the area of simultaneous localization and
mapping (SLAM) make it possible to address this problem now. The
proposed 22-month project will serve as a first study making this kind
of representations available for projects in the second SFB phase.
We propose this project as an "additional activity" in order to
seize an unforeseen chance that has emerged from the recent
breakthrough of efficient SLAM algorithms and from Kirchner's entry
into the SFB/TR8 (A6-[ReactiveSpace]). It addresses what can be
achieved by combining 3-D spatial representations also pursued in
A2-[ThreeDSpace] with a walking robot that can actually operate in a
3-D environment. For SFB/TR 8 the opportunity is to complete its
representation portfolio with a "missing link" between 3-D
perception and action. As an additional benefit the explored
techniques could be employed to visually localize devices such as a PDA
inside a building, a prerequisite for intelligent-building
applications as envisioned by SFB/TR 8.
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