Modelling mobile robot navigation in 3D environments: camera-based stairs recognition in Gazebo

The task of sensory-based autonomous navigation of mobile robots requires data fusion from multiple sources in order to properly detect and recognize environmental obstacles. One of important issues mobile robots deal in a typical multi-level indoor environment is a stair well detection and negotiation. This paper presents ROS-based stairs detection implementation using onboard cameras of the Russian mobile crawler robot Servosila Engineer. Virtual experiments were performed in Gazebo environment with a single camera and a stereo camera.