An effective exploration approach to simultaneous mapping and surface material-type identification of complex three-dimensional environments

This paper presents an integrated exploration approach for geometric mapping and surface material–type identification of complex three‐dimensional (3D) environments using a six‐degree‐of‐freedom industrial robot manipulator. Maps of the surface geometry with the surface material type identified are required for an autonomous robotic system to perform operations in steel bridge maintenance. The proposed approach utilizes information theory to enable multiobjective exploration while new 3D geometric and surface‐type data are fused via probabilistic updates. It is verified that the integrated approach enables the robotic system to perform exploration and surface inspection in real‐world environments. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.