Perceiving the surrounding environment is crucial for autonomous mobile robots. An elevation map provides a memory-efficient and simple yet powerful geometric representation for ground robots. The robots can use this information for navigation in an unknown environment or perceptive locomotion control over rough terrain. Depending on the application, various post processing steps may be incorporated, such as smoothing, inpainting or plane segmentation. In this work, we present an elevation mapping pipeline leveraging GPU for fast and efficient processing with additional features both for navigation and locomotion. We demonstrated our mapping framework through extensive hardware experiments. Our mapping software was successfully deployed for underground exploration during DARPA Subterranean Challenge and for various experiments of quadrupedal locomotion.

翻译：感知周围环境对于自主移动机器人至关重要。 高地图为地面机器人提供了一个记忆效率高、简单而强力的几何图示。 机器人可以在未知环境中使用这些信息进行导航, 或对粗地进行感知移动控制。 根据应用, 可以采用各种后处理步骤, 如平滑、 油漆或平面分割等。 在这项工作中, 我们展示了利用 GPU 进行快速高效处理的高地测绘管道, 并增加了导航和移动功能。 我们通过广泛的硬件实验展示了我们的绘图框架。 我们的绘图软件在DARPA Subterranean Confrection 期间成功地用于地下勘探, 并用于四重移动实验 。