Path Planning and Traversable Area Marking for Stereo Vision-based 3D Map Building

This paper deals with the path-planning of a robot during the exploration and 3D map building in the unknown environment. The robot uses a stereocamera for significant features detection, then matches them in both images and compute their 3D coordinates. This way the robot incrementally creates the 3D map of its surroundings and tries to explore as much area as possible. This paper describes the way of marking the traversable path in the map created so far and the path planning to the next explored goal point. As the map uses points and triangles to represent shape of the surface, the traversable area marking and the path planning is also done in the map which is represented in the same way.