The problem of three-dimensional perception for mobile robots is divided into three major tasks: data acquisition, consistent and efficient representation, and semantic interpretation. For all three tasks we provide novel approaches: a 4 DOF robot arm with a laser range sensor to autonomously scan mid-size 3D objects, a new probabilistic representation for outdoor environments with surfaces at different height levels ("multi-level surface maps"), and a collective classification method to identify objects such as chairs and tables in 3D range scans.
The presented approaches apply and extend...