A System for Continuous Underground Site Mapping and Exploration

Abstract

3D mapping becomes ever more important not only in industrial mobile robotic applications for AGV and production vehicles but also for search and rescue scenarios. In this chapter we report on our work of mapping and exploring underground mines. Our contribution is two-fold: First, we present our custom-built 3D laser range platform SWAP and compare it against an architectural laser scanner. The advantages are that the mapping vehicle can scan in a continuous mode and does not have to do stop-and-go scanning. The second contribution is the mapping tool mapit which supports and automates the registration of large sets of point clouds. The idea behind mapit is to keep the raw point cloud data as a basis for any map generation and only store all operations executed on the point clouds. This way the initial data do not get lost, and improvements on low-level date (e.g. improved transforms through loop closure) will automatically improve the final maps. Finally, we also present methods for visualization and interactive exploration of such maps.