A strategy for acquiring an environmental model with panoramic sensing by a mobile robot

This paper presents a strategy of a vision-guided mobile robot for making models of an unknown environment by panoramic sensing. Before moving in the environment, the robot looks around and finds an outline structure of the local environment as a reference frame for building the models. Then the robot builds the models, which are qualitative, while moving along the local structure. We have implemented the robot behaviors into a mobile robot with multiple vision agents which simultaneously execute different vision tasks needed for the panoramic sensing