Digital Elevation Map Estimation by Vision-Lidar fusion

This paper is about environment perception for navigation system in real outdoor applications. Unlike other approaches that try to detect an obstacle of binary state, we consider here a Digital Elevation Map (DEM). This map has to be built in regards to the guidance system's needs. These needs depend on the vehicle capabilities, its dynamical constraints, its speed etc ... Starting with the navigation system's needs, we establish a perception strategy to fill the DEM the most accuratly possible. This stategy allows to efficiently improve perception capability (sensors and computation capabilities) of our robot. Then, we proposed a system based on this perception strategy by the combinaison of vision and rangefinder.