Ascending Stairway Modeling: A First Step Toward Autonomous Multi-Floor Exploration
Abstract
Many robotics platforms are capable of ascending stairways, but all existing approaches for autonomous stair climbing use stairway detection as a trigger for immediate traversal. In the broader context of autonomous exploration the ability to travel between floors of a building should be compatible with path planning, such that the robot can traverse a stairway at a time that is appropriate to its navigation goals. No system yet presented is capable of both localizing stairways on a map and estimating their properties, functions that in combination would enable stairways to be considered as traversable terrain in a path planning algorithm. We propose a method for modeling stairways as objects and localizing them on a map such that they can be subsequently traversed if they are of dimensions that the robotic platform is capable of climbing. Our system consists of two parts: a computationally efficient detector that leverages geometric cues from depth imagery to detect sets of ascending stairs, and a stairway modeler that uses multiple detections to infer the location and parameters of a stairway that is discovered during exploration. This video demonstrates the performance of the system in a number of real-world situations, modeling and localizing a variety of stairway types in both indoor and outdoor environments.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Oct 01, 2012
- Accession Number
- ADA567543
Entities
People
- David Baran
- Jason J. Corso
- Jeffrey A. Delmerico
- Julian Ryde
- Philip David
Organizations
- United States Army Research Laboratory