Piyoosh Mukhija K. Madhava Krishna
We present an autonomous system for outdoor terrain (road) mapping using a robot equipped with viable low cost sensors (2D laser scanner, cameras, odometry, gyroscope and commercial GPS). The research work on outdoor navigation with known maps has matured well in past few years, but navigation and exploration of roads in an unknown area is still emerging. The presented system is an amalgamation of various computation modules running in parallel and interacting asynchronously with each other through message queues. The goal of the system is for a vehicle to explore and build a road network graph of a given area by autonomously navigating through all the connected roads in the area. The graph nodes contain topographic and semantic properties to allow reconstruction of the road network at a later stage for easier navigation.