Abstract
This paper presents a method to recognize the plane regions for movement of walking robots. When the autonomous agencies using stereo camera or laser scanning sensor is under unknown 3D environment, the mobile agency has to detect the plane regions to decide the moving direction and perform the given tasks. In this paper, we propose a very fast method for plane detection using normal vector of a triangle by 3 vertices defined on a small circular region. To reduce the effect of noises and outliers, the triangle rotates with respect to the center position of the circular region and generates a series of triangles with different normal vectors based on different three points on the boundary of the circular region. The vectors for several triangles are normalized and then median direction of the normal vectors is used to test the planarity of the circular region. The method is very fast and we prove the performance of algorithm for real range data obtained from a stereo camera system.
