Int. J. Intelligent Systems Technologies and Applications, Vol. x, No. x, xxxx 1 A simple modeling of complex environments for mobile robots Jun Miura* Department of Information and Computer Sciences, Toyohashi University of Technology E-mail: jun@ics.tut.ac.jp ∗ Corresponding author Suguru Ikeda Department of Mechanical Engineering, Osaka University Currently with NTT Data corporation. Abstract: This paper deals with 3D environment modeling for mobile robots. The environment model we would like to generate is to be used as a medium of communication of location information between users and mobile robots. For such communication, a very precise environment model is not necessary. We thus develop a method of generating 3D model which is simple enough to gen- erate fast but has sufficient geometric and appearance information. We also de- velop a robot localization method and a graphical user interface, and verify that the model can actually support such communication. Keywords: 3D environment modeling; mobile robots; active contour model Reference to this paper should be made as follows: J. Miura and S. Ikeda, ‘A simple modeling of complex environments for mobile robots’, Int. J. Intelligent Systems Technology and Applications, Vol. x, No. x, pp.xxx–xxx. Biographical notes: Jun Miura received Dr.Eng. degree in information engi- neering in 1989 at University of Tokyo. From April 1989 to March 2007, he had been a faculty member at Department of Mechanical Engineering, Osaka Uni- versity. Since April 2007, he has been a Professor at Department of Information and Computer Sciences, Toyohashi University of Technology. From March 1994 to February 1995, he was a Visiting Scientist at Computer Science Department, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA.He received the Best Paper Award from the Robotics Society of Japan in 1997. Prof. Miura published over 100 pa- pers in international journals and conferences in the areas of intelligent robotics, computer vision, and artificial intelligence. Suguru Ikeda received B.Eng. and M.Eng. degrees in mechanical engineering in 2005 and 2007, respectively, at Osaka University, Suita, Japan. He joined NTT Data corp. in 2007. Copyright c  200x Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.