ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces a less computationally-demanding and more accurate 3D localization and mapping approach with terrain-inclination assistance for outdoor mobile robots navigating on inclined terrains. Traditionally, the Iterative Closest Points (ICP) algorithm is used to align the overlapped local maps, whereby the overhanging obstacles are generally treated as landmarks. In order to balance the accuracy and computational load as well as to take advantage of ICP matching, the chapter introduces different method, terrain-inclination–aided 3D localization and mapping technique, to combine the ICP algorithm and the inclination of the terrains the robot is navigating so as to achieve autonomous 3D localization and mapping. The chapter discusses three coordinate systems. They are the world coordinate system, the robot coordinate system, and the laser coordinate system. The chapter utilizes the ICP algorithm to align each pair of the local point clouds maps to finally build the global map of the navigation area.
