A Proposal of an Evaluation Field Constructed for Modeled Uneven Terrain for the Automatic Map-Generating Methods of the Rescue Robots

Abstract

Robots were used to explore the World Trade Center (WTC) site after the September 11 terrorist strike, and the interior of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant (FDNP) that was destroyed by the March 11 tsunami. Over the next several decades, robot design should be focused on use in unstable and dynamically changing environments such as those of WTC and FDNP. An important mission for rescue robots is making maps that can easily be understood by humans from information gathered on the changed terrain and victim locations in a disaster area. This automatic map-generating function is a popular topic for research on rescue robots. The performance of new and enhanced automatic map-generating functions must also be evaluated. In this paper, we propose a method for quantifying evaluation fields constructed for modeled uneven terrain and show the effect of a robot's movements on the performance of simultaneous localization and mapping methods.