Robust data fusion with occupancy grid

Accurate models of the environment are a crucial requirement for autonomous mobile robots. The process of how to acquire knowledge about the operating environment is one of the most challenging problems in this research area. The quality of the model depends on the number and types of sensors used. Occupancy grids are the most common low-level models of the environment used in robotics for fusion of noisy data. This paper first introduces a novel method for building an occupancy grid from a monocular color camera. The next part of the work describes a method for fusion of camera data with data from a rangefinder. The final part presents a new method for measuring the quality of the occupancy grid based on the quality of the path created by the grid. The methods were experimentally verified with an indoor experimental robot at the Czech Technical University.