An Omnidirectional Vision System for Outdoor Mobile Robots

Abstract

Abstract. The advancements made in microprocessor and image sen-sory technology have made inexpensive, fast and robust computers and high resolution cameras widely available. This opens up many new pos-sibilities as researchers can now take advantage of the rich visual in-formation of the environment provided by the vision system. However, conventional cameras have a limited field of view, which is a constraint for certain applications in computational vision. As a result, the use of omnidirectional vision systems have become more prevalent within the robotics community in recent years. In this paper, a novel variable multi-baseline stereo omnidirectional vision system and its algorithms intended for outdoor navigation will be presented.