Obstacle modeling for environment recognition of mobile robots using growing neural gas network

A major research issue associated with service robots is the creation of an environment recognition system for mobile robot navigation that is robust and efficient on various environment situations. In recent years, intelligent autonomous mobile robots have received much attention as the types of service robots for serving people and industrial robots for replacing human. To help people, robots must be able to sense and recognize three dimensional space where they live or work. In this paper, we propose a three dimensional environmental modeling method based on an edge enhancement technique using a planar fitting method and a neural network technique called "Growing Neural Gas Network." Input data pre-processing provides probabilistic density to the input data of the neural network, and the neural network generates a graphical structure that reflects the topology of the input space. Using these methods, robot's surroundings are autonomously clustered into isolated objects and modeled as polygon patches with the user-selected resolution. Through a series of simulations and experiments, the proposed method is tested to recognize the environments surrounding the robot. From the experimental results, the usefulness and robustness of the proposed method are investigated and discussed in detail.