Map Building with Line Segments for Sonar Based Mobile Robot Navigations

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to build and to manage environment models with line segments from the sonar range data on obstacles in unknown and varied environments. The proposed method subsequently employs a two-stage data-transform process in order to extract environmental line segments from the range data on obstacles. In the first stage, the sonar range data is mapped and accumulated to a twodimensional local histogram grid. In the second stage the local histogram grid is mapped to a line histogram by Hough transform. New line segments can be found at maximum density cells in the line histogram and they are composed to the global line segments map. The proposed technique is illustrated by experiments in an indoor environment.