Noise removal of LRF for 3D map building using the superposition median filter

In this paper, a single LRF has been used to produce a 3D map for the mobile robot navigation. The 2D laser scanners are used for mobile robots navigation, where the laser scanner is applied to detect a certain level of area by the straight beam. Therefore it is limited to the usages of 2D obstacle detection and avoidance. In this research, it is designed to complement a mobile robot system to move up and down a single LRF along the yaw axis. During the up and down motion, the 2D data are stacked and manipulated to build a 3D map. Often a single LRF data are mixed with a lot of noises, it's like Gaussian and Impulse. The noises are removed out by the superposition median filter designed in this research. The 2D data which are improved by deleting the noises are layered to build the 3D map. Removing impulse noises while preserving the boundary is a main advantages of the SMF (Superposition Median Filter) which has been used widely to improve the quality of images. The effectiveness of this SMF for rejecting the noise has been verified through the real experiments.