Robust 2D Mapping Integrating with 3D Information for the Autonomous Mobile Robot Under Dynamic Environment

In order to move around automatically, mobile robots usually need to recognize their working environment first. Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) has become an important research field recently, by which the robot can generate a map while moving around. Both two-dimensional (2D) mapping and three-dimensional (3D) mapping methods have been developed greatly with high accuracy. However, 2D maps cannot reflect the space information of the environment and 3D mapping needs long processing time. Moreover, conventional SLAM methods based on grid maps take a long time to delete the moving objects from the map and are hard to delete the potential moving objects. In this paper, a 2D mapping method integrating with 3D information based on immobile area occupied grid maps is proposed. Objects in 3D space are recognized and their space information (e.g., shapes) and properties (moving objects or potential moving objects like people standing still) are projected to the 2D plane for updating the 2D map. By using the immobile area occupied grid map method, recognized still objects are reflected to the map quickly by updating the immobile area occupancy probability with a high coefficient. Meanwhile, recognized moving objects and potential moving objects are not used for updating the map. The unknown objects are reflected to the 2D map with a lower immobile area occupancy probability so that they can be deleted quickly once they are recognized as moving objects or start to move. The effectiveness of our method is proven by experiments of mapping under dynamic indoor environment using a mobile robot.