Digital Elevation Map estimation by vision-lidar fusion

This paper is about environment perception for navigation system in real outdoor applications. Unlike other approaches that try to detect an obstacle of binary state, we consider here a Digital Elevation Map (DEM). This map has to be built in regards to the guidance system´s needs. These needs depend on the vehicle capabilities, its dynamical constraints, its speed etc... Starting with the navigation system´s needs, we establish a perception strategy to fill the DEM the most accuratly possible. This stategy allows to efficiently improve perception capability (sensors and computation capabilities) of our robot. Then, we proposed a system based on this perception strategy by the combinaison of vision and rangefinder.