TINA: the sheffield AIVRU vision system

Abstract

We describe the Sheffield AIVRU 3D vision system for robotics. The system currently supports model based object recognition and location; its potential for robotics applications is demonstrated by its guidance of a UMI robot arm in a pick and place task. The system comprises: 1) The recovery of a sparse depth map using edge based passive stereo triangulation. 2) The grouping, description and segmentation of edge segments to recover a 3D description of the scene geometry in terms of straight lines and circular arcs. 3) The statistical combination of 3D descriptions for the purpose of object model creation from multiple stereo views, and the propagation of constraints for within view refinement. 4) The matching of 3D wireframe models to 3D scene descriptions, to recover an initial estimate of their position and orientation.