Motion-based stereovision method with potential utility in robot navigation

Abstract

Autonomous robot guidance in dynamic environments requires, on the one hand, the study of relative motion of the objects of the environment with respect to the robot, and on the other hand, the analysis of the depth towards those objects. In this paper, a stereo vision method, which combines both topics with potential utility in robot navigation, is proposed. The goal of the stereo vision model is to calculate depth of surrounding objects by measuring the disparity between the two-dimensional imaged positions of the object points in a stereo pair of images. The simulated robot guidance algorithm proposed starts from the motion analysis that occurs in the scene and then establishes correspondences and analyzes the depth of the objects. Once these steps have been performed, the next step is to induce the robot to take the direction where objects are more distant in order to avoid obstacles. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.