Polygon-based laser scan registration by heterogeneous robots

This paper presents an algorithm to register two laser scans acquired by dual heterogeneous robots in a structured indoor environment. The dual robot system consists of a ground robot and a wall climbing robot equipped with a 3D range scanner and a perspective camera. Both robots alternately step in tandem and stop to acquire a panoramic range image. At each step, the range images from the two robots are registered together and the relative pose of the two robots are updated with respect to the world coordinate frame. An initial estimate of the relative pose between the two range images is computed using a camera pose estimation algorithm with the aid of the camera on the wall-climbing robot. The pose estimate is further refined by a laser scan registration algorithm. This novel algorithm registers two sets of polygons extracted from overlapping range images. The experimental results indicate that the algorithm is robust to fusion of noisy range images acquired in structured indoor environment.