Position estimation in outdoor environments using pixel tracking and stereovision

Abstract

Presents a method that estimates robot displacements in outdoor unstructured terrain. It computes the displacements on the basis of associations of 3D points sets produced by consecutive stereovision frames, the associations being determined by tracking pixels from one image frame to the other. The paper details the various steps of the algorithms, and first experimental results are presented: they show that the algorithm is able to estimate the 6 parameters of the robot position with a relative error smaller than about 5%, processing several hundreds of images over several tens of meters.