Design of a low-cost vision system for laser profilometry aiding smart vehicles movement

Abstract

We present a fast and accurate method to derive the pose of a mobile vehicle moving within bounded paths. A triangulation-based vision system made of a laser source, able to generate a line pattern, and a high speed camera is applied on the front side of an autonomous vehicle, namely the SmoovASRVplatform, which is able to store and retrieve pallets in smart warehouses. The presented system extracts the properties of the emitted laser line on the camera plane and transfers these information to the vehicle reference system. Then, the presence of constitutive landmarks along the path, i.e., holes and bends, permit the estimation of other parameters, such as vehicle speed, enabling the exact control of the vehicle. Further validations have returned accuracies lower than 2 and 3.2% in distance and tilt measurements with respect to the rail border, respectively.