Three-dimensional localization and mapping for mobile robot in disaster environments

To relieve damages of earthquake disaster, "The Special Project for Earthquake Disaster Mitigation in Urban Areas" have been kicked off in Japan. Our research group is a part of the sub-project "modeling of disaster environment for search and rescue" since 2002. In this project, our group aims to develop a three-dimensional mapping's algorithm that is installed in a mobile robot to search victims in a collapsed building. To realize this mission, it is important to map environment information, and also the mapping requires localization simultaneously. (This is called "SLAM problem".) In this research, we use three-dimensional map by laser range finder, and we also estimate its location in a global map using correlation technique. In this paper, we introduce our localization and mapping method, and we report a result of preparatory experiment for localization.