Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 16 (NIPS 2003)
David Ferguson, Aaron Morris, Dirk Hähnel, Christopher Baker, Zachary Omohundro, Carlos Reverte, Scott Thayer, Charles Whittaker, William Whittaker, Wolfram Burgard, Sebastian Thrun
We present the software architecture of a robotic system for mapping abandoned mines. The software is capable of acquiring consistent 2D maps of large mines with many cycles, represented as Markov random £elds. 3D C-space maps are acquired from local 3D range scans, which are used to identify navigable paths using A* search. Our system has been deployed in three abandoned mines, two of which inaccessible to people, where it has acquired maps of unprecedented detail and accuracy.