非水平箇所を含む屋内床面を移動するロボットのための 床面高さ地図を用いた未知物体検出技術

抄録

This paper proposes an unknown object detection technique for mobile robots that can be applied in indoor environments with floors including several non-horizontal partial areas. In these environments, practical techniques using a 2D range finder with an assumption of robots' horizontal locomotion cannot distinguish between unknown objects and floors when robots' sensors slightly rotate to downward direction on small slopes. On the other hand, conventional techniques with 3D sensing need several orders of magnitude higher computational costs and memory usages compared with practical 2D techniques. To address these issues, the proposed technique introduces a floor height map and a 3D gyroscope in addition to a conventional 2D object map and a 2D range finder. By registration between measured range data and the two types of 2D maps using 3D orientation obtained from the gyroscope, unknown objects can be detected and distinguished from floors with computational costs and memory usages in the same order of magnitude as practical 2D techniques. In addition, using the floor height map, the proposed technique can also collect the 3D orientation that has accumulative errors caused by integration of angular velocities measured by the gyroscope. The function can improve sustainability and practical utility of environment recognition including unknown object detection.