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So, i may be late in answering, but can you add to what you said?

able to do SLAM without falling down the stairs

do you want to skip the stairs and move around or detect the stairs and go up/down? if its the detection and moving away scenario, you can do something like this.

1. feed the point cloud from camera to octomap server
2. evaluate the octomap's ground layer or a layer below that. you can use a leaf iterator and check nodes with z coordinate 0 or -1 for occupancy.
3. if you find any unoccupied cells, then that means there is a hole in the ground. probably stairs :D
4. you can generate a cost map layer with that details or add it directly to the cost map you are using.

hope this is helpful.

if you can get your hands on a Kinect, then its IR depth camera would enable you to capture indoors easily outdoors might cause issues. computational requirements are not that high for a static environment i would say. Ran Octomap server on a RPi perfectly (but cannot use rviz on RPi of course).

So, i may be late in answering, but can you add to what you said?

able to do SLAM without falling down the stairs

do you want to skip the stairs and move around or detect the stairs and go up/down? if its the detection and moving away scenario, you can do something like this.

1. feed the point cloud from camera to octomap server
2. evaluate the octomap's ground layer or a layer below that. you can use a leaf iterator and check nodes with z coordinate 0 or -1 for occupancy.
3. if you find any unoccupied cells, then that means there is a hole in the ground. probably stairs :D
4. finally, you can generate a cost map layer with that details or add it directly to the cost map you are using.using. add the detected region as a obstacle and the robot will navigate around it.

hope this is helpful.

if you can get your hands on a Kinect, then its IR depth camera would enable you to capture indoors easily easily, without any light issues. outdoors might cause issues. issues due to sun. computational requirements are not that high for a static environment i would say. Ran Octomap server on a RPi perfectly (but cannot use rviz on RPi of course).