Fast 3 D Perception for Collision Avoidance and SLAM in Domestic Environments 1 Fast 3 D Perception for Collision Avoidance and SLAM in Domestic Environments

Autonomous service robots that assist in housekeeping, serve as butlers, guide visitors through exhibitions in museums and trade fairs, or provide care to elderly and disabled people could substantially ease everyday life for many people and present an enormous economic potential (Haegele et al., 2001; Pollack et al., 2002; Siegwart et al., 2003). Moreover, regarding the aging society in most industrialized countries the application of service robots in (elderly) health care might not only be helpful but necessary in the future. However, these service robots face the challenging task of operating in real-world indoor and domestic environments. Domestic environments tend to be cluttered, dynamic and populated by humans and domestic animals. In order to adequately react to sudden dynamic changes and avoid collisions, these robots need to be able to constantly acquire and process, in real-time, information about their environment. Furthermore, in order to act in a goal-directed manner, plan actions and navigate effectively, autonomous mobile robots need an internal representation or map of their environment. Nature and complexity of these representations highly depend on the robot’s task and workspace. When operating in preliminary unknown environments, e.g., when it is unfeasible (or simply uncomfortable) to manually model the environment beforehand, the robot needs to construct an internal environment model on its own. Moreover, in dynamic environments the robot further needs to be able to continuously acquire and integrate new sensory information to update the internal environment model in regions where changes have taken place. As integrating new information into the model (mapping) requires knowledge about the robot’s pose (position and orientation in the environment) and determining the robot’s pose requires a map of the environment, these two problems need to be considered jointly and the problem 4