Textured voxel-bounded planes: Efficient representation of color points for 3D mapping and visualization

Recent developments in mobile robotics sensor technology have seen the introduction of color and depth (RGB-D) sensors which deliver large quantities of data. For mobile robots this data, consisting of RGB colored xyz points, needs to be continuously and quickly incorporated into a global representation as it streams from the sensors. The resulting representation must support visualization for effective human-robot supervisory control and be efficient for robotics algorithms such as SLAM and path planning.