Fast Staircase Detection and Estimation using 3D Point Clouds with Multi-detection Merging for Heterogeneous Robots

June 2023

Fast Staircase Detection and Estimation using 3D Point Clouds with Multi-detection Merging for Heterogeneous Robots

Conference Paper
Proceedings of (ICRA) International Conference on Robotics and Automation

Abstract:

Robotic systems need advanced mobility capabilities to operate in complex, three-dimensional environments designed for human use, e.g., multi-level buildings. Incorporating some level of autonomy enables robots to operate robustly, reliably, and efficiently in such complex environments, e.g., automatically “returning home” if communication between an operator and robot is lost during deployment. This work presents a novel method that enables mobile robots to robustly operate in multi-level environments by making it possible to autonomously locate and climb a range of different staircases. We present results wherein a wheeled robot works together with a quadrupedal system to quickly detect different staircases and reliably climb them. The performance of this novel staircase detection algorithm that is able to run on the heterogeneous platforms is compared to the current state-of-the-art detection algorithm. We show that our approach significantly increases the accuracy and speed at which detections occur.
@conference{Sriganesh-2023-137507,
author = {Prasanna Sriganesh And Namya Bagree And Bhaskar Vundurthy And Matthew Travers},
title = {Fast Staircase Detection and Estimation using 3D Point Clouds with Multi-detection Merging for Heterogeneous Robots},
booktitle = {Proceedings of (ICRA) International Conference on Robotics and Automation},
year = {2023},
month = {June},
publisher = {IEEE},
keywords = {Robot Perception, Staircase Detection, Point Cloud Estimation},
}
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