R-GIS: Robotic and Geographic Information System

Abstract

This paper proposes the concept of R-GIS, which is a geographic information system (GIS) for providing robots with environmental information. A GIS is capturing, storing, managing and presenting geographic information, and is used for various applications such as urban planning, agriculture, emergency response. In order to use a GIS for with robots, R-GIS is designed from two viewpoints. The first one is how to manage and present environmental information for robot planning. The second one is how to capture and store environmental information sensed by robots and sensors in the environment. In addition, we briefly show the system configuration of R-GIS, trends around GIS in Japan and an experimental field for R-GIS.