Planar SurfaceMapping

We present a feature based mapping technique that allows for the use of planar surfaces such as walls, tables, counters, or other surfaces as landmarks. These planar surfaces are detected in 3D point clouds, and provide measurements via their surface normal and perpendicular distance. We also map the convex hulls of the observed planar patches and use these for data association, allowing multiple non-overlapping coplanar landmarks to exist in the map. Maps of such planar surfaces could be useful for semantic mapping, and could benefit mobile manipulation tasks.