World modeling for a sensor-in-hand robot arm

In many robotics applications, e.g. telerobotics under long time delay, building a geometric world model from multisensory data is a crucial requirement. Using a sensor-in-hand configuration to generate a model referenced to the robot base, imposes specific problems. Moving the sensor frame on an arbitrary path over and around an unknown object generates a completely unordered 'data cloud'. A surface reconstruction algorithm, which is based on Kohonen's self-organizing feature maps is used to process this data cloud and to generate a useful surface description. This surface can be used for object recognition and pose estimation using algorithms which were developed in the field of range image understanding.