Autonomous Navigation of a Surveillance Robot in Harsh Outdoor Road Environments

This paper deals with the autonomous navigation problem of a mobile robot in outdoor road environments. The target application is surveillance in petroleum storage bases. Although there have been remarkable technological achievements recently in the area of outdoor navigation, robotic systems are still expensive due to a large number of high cost sensors. This paper proposes the reliable extraction algorithm of traversable regions using a single onboard Laser Range Finder (LRF) in outdoor road environments. The traversable regions are derived from the classifications of the road surfaces, curbs, and obstacles. The proposed scheme was experimentally tested in success. Since there are many potential applications that require autonomous service robots to move in semistructured road environments, the proposed scheme can be widely used as a low-cost practical solution.