Using a laser range finder mounted on a micro vision robot to estimate environmental parameters

In this article we will present a new robot (MicroVision) that has been designed at the University of Minnesota (UMN), Center for Distributed Robotics. Its design reminds of the designs of previous robots built at the UMN such as the COTS Scouts or the eROSIs. It is composed of a body with two wheels and a tail just like the two aforementioned robots. However, the MicroVision has more powerful processing and sensing capabilities and we utilized these to compute areas in the surrounding environment by using a convex hull approach. We are trying to estimate the projected area of an object onto the ground. This is done by the computation of convex hulls that are based on the data received from the MicroVision's laser range finder. Although localization of the robot is an important feature in being able to compute these convex hulls, localization and mapping techniques are only used as a tool and are not an end in this work. The main idea of this work is to demonstrate the ability of the laser carrying MicroVision robot to move around an object in order to get a scan from each side. From these scans, the convex hull of the shape is deduced and its projected area onto the ground is estimated.