Using Radar for Grid Based Indoor Mapping

Abstract

Mobile robot navigation mostly relies on information gathered by lidars and cameras to detect and map obstacles. However, these sensors become useless both in fires and other environments that have reduced visibility due to smoke, dust and smog. Radars, on the other hand, are not affected by these and therefore provide a viable solution to support robots in low visibility environments. However, radars provide sparse measurements and may detect multi-path reflections, resulting in perception of ghost objects. This work demonstrates the use of a radar to support mobile robot mapping in indoor environments. A range based filtering approach is proposed to reduce the effect of ghost detections and the approach is validated in different scenarios.