Abstract
The purpose of this study is to build and manage environment models with line segments from sonar range data on obstacles in unknown and varied environments. The proposed method therefore employs a two-stage data-transform process in order to extract environmental line segments from range data on obstacles. In the first stage, the occupancy grid extracted from the range data is accumulated to form a two-dimensional local histogram grid. In the second stage, a line histogram extracted from a local histogram grid is based on a Hough transform, and matching serves as a means of comparing each of the segments on a global line segments map against the line segments to detect the degree of similarity in the overlap, orientation, and arrangement. Each of these tests is formulated by comparing one of the parameters in the segment representation. After the tests, new line segments can be found at maximum-density cells in the line histogram, and they are composed onto the global line segment map. The proposed technique is demonstrated in experiments in an indoor environment.