Drivable road region detection using a single laser range finder for outdoor patrol robots

For outdoor navigation, it is necessary to find the relevant features of outdoor road environments and detect drivable region for robot's motion. This paper presents a methodology for extracting the drivable road region by detecting the prominent road features and obstacles through a single laser range finder. The prominent features of roads are curbs and the road surface. The laser range finder is mounted on the mobile robot, looks down the road with a small tilt angle, and obtains two-dimensional range data. The proposed method is computationally more efficient in comparison with vision-based techniques and applicable for various road conditions in target environment. Experimental results confirm the reliability of the algorithm.