A Stereovision-based navigation system for a mobile robot

Abstract

This report describes the work at INRIA on obstacle avoidance and trajectory planning for a mobile robot using stereovision. Our mobile robot is equipped with a trinocular vision system that has been put into hardware and is be capable of delivering 3D maps of the environment at rates between 1 and 5 Hz. Those 3D maps contain line segments extracted from the images and reconstructed in three dimensions. They are used for a variety of tasks including obstacle avoidance and trajectory planning. For those two tasks, we project on the ground floor the 3D line segments to obtain a two-dimensional map, we simplify the map according to some simple geometric criteria, and use the remaining 2D segments to construct a tessellation, more precisely a triangulation, of the ground floor. This tessellation has several advantages: ffl It is adapted to the structure of the environment since all stereo segments are edges of triangles in the tessellation, ffl It can be efficiently computed ...