A Survey on Recent Reflective Detection Methods in Simultaneous Localization and Mapping for Robot Applications

Reflective material is one of the most popular materials in modern indoor and outdoor decoration because of its incredible light transmission performance, good sound insulation performance, pretty appearance and ease to clean. However, the laser sensor which is the mainstream senor used by robot to percept environment is incapable to detect transparent or reflective objects correctly. It leads that the robot can’t localize itself and generate map accurately, thus leads to serious consequence that the robot may have a collision in its working environment. There is a very real need for an approach to detect reflective material in robot working environment. This paper reviews most approaches to overcome drawback of detecting reflective material in SLAM and classifies them into three groups, namely, laser senor information only approaches, multi-sensor information-fusion approaches and artificial intelligence-based approaches. It can be a useful reference for researchers who will work in this field in the future.