An autonomous robotic system for mapping abandoned mines.

D. Ferguson, A. Morris, D. Haehnel, C. Baker, Z. Omohundro, C. Reverte, S. Thayer, W. Whittaker, W. Whittaker, W. Burgard, and S. Thrun.

We present the software architecture of a robotic system for mapping abandoned mines. The software is capable of acquiring consistent 2D maps of large mines with many cycles, represented as Markov random fields. 3D C-space maps are acquired from local 3D range scans, which are used to identify navigable paths using A* search. Our system has been deployed in three abandoned mines, two of which inaccessible to people, where it has acquired maps of unprecedented detail and accuracy.

The full paper is available in PDF and gzipped Postscript

@INPROCEEDINGS{Ferguson03a,
  AUTHOR	= {D. Ferguson and A. Morris and D. H\"{a}hnel and C. Baker and Z. Omohundro and C. Reverte and S. Thayer and W. Whittaker and W. Whittaker and W. Burgard and S. Thrun},
  TITLE		= {An Autonomous Robotic System for Mapping Abandoned Mines},
  YEAR		= {2003},
  BOOKTITLE	= {Proceedings of Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS)},
  EDITOR	= {S. Thrun and L. Saul and B. Sch\"{o}lkopf},
  PUBLISHER	= {MIT Press}
}