The usability of mobile robots for surveillance, search and rescue missions can be significantly improved by intelligent functionalities decreasing the cognitive load on the operator or even allowing autonomous operations, e.g., when communication fails. Mobility in this regard is not only a mechatronic problem but also a perception, modeling and planning challenge. Here, the perception issue of detecting drivable ground is addressed, an important issue for safety, security, and rescue robots, which have to operate in a vast range of unstructured, challenging environments. The simple yet efficient approach is based on the Hough transform of planes. The idea is to design the parameter space such that drivable surfaces can be easily detected by the number of hits in the bins corresponding to drivability. A decision tree International University Bremen until spring 2007