NURBS-based representation of urban environments for mobile robots

Representation of the surrounding environment is a vital task for a mobile robot. Many applications for mobile robots in urban environments may be considered such as self-driving cars, delivery drones or assistive robots. In contrast to the conventional methods, in this paper a Non Uniform Rational B-Spline (NURBS) based technique is represented for 3D mapping of the surrounding environment. While in the state of the art techniques, the robot's environment is expressed in a discrete space, the proposed method is mainly developed for representation of environment in a continuous space. Exploiting the information theory, the generated representation has much lower complexity and more compression capability in relation to some state of the art techniques. In addition to representation in a lower dimensional space, the NURBS based representation is invariant against 3D geometric transformations. Furthermore, the NURBS based representation can be employed for obstacle avoidance and navigation. The applicability of the proposed algorithm is investigated in some urban environments through some publicly available data sets. It has been shown by some experiments that the proposed method has better visual representation and much better data compression compared to some state-of-the-art methods.