ABSTRACT For a mobile robot to navigate in an environment, manipulate objects in it and avoid collisons, it must have precise data

about the space representation, perception, localization and mapping. Reliable representation of the enviroment can be obtained by combining information acquired by several sensors. Kinect is a sensor which gives precise RGB-D information. It has an inbuilt tilt motor for larger field of view surveillance and also includes microphones, accelerometer which make it a very suitable sensor for robotic applications Robot Operating System (ROS) is a software framework for robot software development. It is a meta operating system that provides standard operating system services such as harware abstraction, low-level device control, packet management, etc. It is based on a graph architecture where processing takes place in nodes that may recieve, post and multiplex sensor, control, state, planning, actuatot, and other messages. It is also a robust tool for visualization. ROS is built for linux and the completely tested version is available only for the ubuntu flavor. Using kinect and the many librarires present in the ROS framework, we want to create a 6-D map of the terrain. The additional libraries required are the PCl library and Openni. The different features can be extracted like the corners, vertical edges, colour pateches, etc. ROS can be programmed using python and c++, of which I have only basic understanding. I have to learn the basics of the ROS and any of the above languages in order to generate the required map. Once the map is generated the next task is to localise the mobile robot. Topological localization apporoaches are to studied and impletmented again on the ROS platform.