Natural scene understanding for mobile robot navigation

In this paper, we focus on some perceptual functions required by a generic task “GOTO” in natural environments; in previous works, only geometrical modeling has been used to deal with two fundamental tasks: landmark extraction and recognition for sensor-based motion control or robot localization, and terrain modeling for motion planning. Geometrical representations alone lead to a bulky model, and, after some iterations, to a combinatorial explosion. We present here, higher level representations; from a range image, given some assumptions on the perceived scene (even ground with few objects), we propose a segmentation algorithm to extract simple semantical representations for the ground and the objects; then, we can analyze the relative positions of the objects to build a topological scene description. Both models constitute the scene model, needed for further incremental environment modeling