Compact Encoding of Robot-Generated 3D Maps for Efficient Wireless Transmission

This work focuses on real-time compression of laser data on board a mobile robot platform. Data is transmitted from the robot over low-bandwidth channels or incrementally in short bursts to a host, where it can be further processed for visualization. For compression purposes, the data is represented as a gray scale depth image. Considered are existing lossless image and file compression schemes (Unix compress, gzip, bzip2, PNG, Jpeg-LS), as well as wavelet transformations tailored to the specific nature of the data. Testing is done on several sets of indoor data acquired by a robot moving through rooms and hallways. The results show that Jpeg-LS compression performs best in this setting.