Constructing virtual mines for navigation

This article presents an underground mine model created to study such tasks as autonomous navigation, obstacle avoidance, exploration and surveying, or place recognition. We first describe the generic object model upon which the mine model is based, and then describe the mine model itself. To study the aforementioned problems, we have developed a software package that uses a mine representation (an instance of the model) as input and generates virtual mines used as simulation environments. We then describe the complementary problem of how to construct mine representations from surveying data.