Real-time 3D map building for local navigation of a walking robot in unstructured terrain

Locomotion of walking machines on a well defined path in unstructured terrain requires a model of the environment. But, in particular, middle sized robots like LAURON III don´t provide the possibility to carry large or heavy sensors. This paper focuses on generating a 3D map of unstructured environment on the basis of sparse sensory information. In respect of walking robots this covers at first the selection of the next footsteps. For this purpose the advanced inference grid is introduced as a variant of the vector field histogram for the representation of the environment.