Real-time door detection in cluttered environments

A mobile robot, called a ranger, equipped with a ring of sonars and a color camera is at the center of this research effort. The ranger is part of a fleet of heterogenous robots. Its task is to quickly deploy multiple smaller robots with specialized sensing capabilities, called scouts, into different rooms. In order to achieve the goal, the ranger must be able to safely navigate through potentially unknown urban environments as well as autonomously detect areas into which the scouts should be released. This paper presents the ranger's sensing and control algorithms and reports results from several different environments.