Efficient GPU-based Construction of Occupancy Grids Using several Laser Range-finders

Manuel Yguel (1) , Olivier Aycard (1) , Christian Laugier (1)

1 E-MOTION - Geometry and Probability for Motion and Action

Building occupancy grids (OGs) in order to model the surrounding environment of a vehicle implies to fusion occupancy information provided by the different embedded sensors in the same grid. The principal difficulty comes from the fact that each can have a different resolution, but also that the resolution of some sensors varies with the location in the field of view. In this article we present a new exact approach to this issue and we explain why the problem of switching coordinate systems is an instance of the texture mapping problem in computer graphics. Therefore we introduce a calculus architecture to build occupancy grids with a graphical processor unit (GPU). Thus we present computational time results that can allow to compute occupancy grids for 50 sensors at frame rate even for a very fine grid. To validate our method, the results with GPU are compared to results obtained through the exact approach.

Domaines: Autre [cs.OH]

Manuel Yguel, Olivier Aycard, Christian Laugier. Efficient GPU-based Construction of Occupancy Grids Using several Laser Range-finders. Proc. of the IEEE-RSJ Int. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2006, Beijing (CN), China. ⟨inria-00182008⟩