This paper presents a geometrical feature detection system to use with conventional 2D laser rangefinders. This system consists of three main modules: data acquisition and pre-processing, rupture and breakpoint detection and feature extraction. The novelty of this system is a new efficient approach for natural feature extraction based on curvature estimation. This approach permits to extract and characterise line segments, corners and curve segments from the laser scan. Experimental results show that the proposed approach is very fast and permit to verify its effectiveness in indoor and outdoor environments

This paper presents a hybrid layered architecture for intelligent transportation. The system relies on integrating odometry, DGPS and compass readings for localization and deliberative planning, whereas the path is tracked at low level by means of a CBR based reactive navigation algorithm capable of adapting to the vehicle kinematics and environment conditions through learning. The system has been successfully tested using a 4-wheeled outdoors robot Pioneer AT

This paper presents a visual attention mechanism for the acquisition of landmarks in an arbitrary scene. The proposed mechanism consists of two consecutive selection stages. The first one employs classical preattentive saliency computa tions to select a reduced set of interest regions from the whole input image (data-driven stage). The second stage selects from the output of the first selection stage the region that can be considered as a potential landmark (model-driven stage). This potential landmark is the input of the attentive stage, that must characterize it and finally determine if this object is a real landmark. The used imaging sensor is a stereo vision system which is capable of providing depth data as well as color images. This stereo vision system is mounted on an autonomous mobile robot and serves map-building and localisation purposes. We present results achieved by applying the proposed visual attention scheme to on-line acquired stereo pairs of indoor and outdoor scenes.