Adding place_recognition to pcl

Active environment perception and autonomous place recognition play a key role for mobile robots to operate within a cluttered indoor environment with dynamic changes.

place_recognition provides a novel 3D-laser-based indoor place recognition method to deal with the random disturbances caused by unexpected movements of people and other objects.

The proposed approach can extract and match the Speeded-Up Robust Features (SURFs) from bearing-angle images generated by a 3D laser scanner. It can cope with the irregular disturbance of moving objects and the problem of observing-location changes of the laser scanner. Both global metric information and local SURF features are extracted from 3D laser point clouds and 2D bearing-angle images, respectively.

A large-scale indoor environment with over 1600 m2 and 30 offices is selected as a testing site, and a mobile robot, i.e., SmartROB2, is deployed for conducting experiments. Experimental results show that the proposed 3-D-laser-based scene measurement technique and place recognition approach are effective and provide robust performance of place recognition in a dynamic indoor environment.