Map building for mobile robot navigation with omnidirectional stereo vision.

Author(s)

Cláudia Cristina Ghirardello Deccó

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Escola Politécnica (EP/BC)
• Defense date: 2004-04-23

Examining board members

Jun Okamoto Junior; Mario Fernando Montenegro Campos; Andre Riyuiti Hirakawa; Lucas Antonio Moscato; Hans Jorg Andreas Schneebeli

• Advisor: Jun Okamoto Junior

Abstract

The problem of mobile robot navigation has been studied for many years, aiming at build a robot with an high degree of autonomy. The increase in autonomy of a mobile robot is related to its capacity of acquisition of information and the “automation" of tasks, such as the environment map building. In this aspect vision has been widely used due to the great amount of information in an image. Besides that catadioptric omnidirectional sensors allow to get visual information in a 360o image, discharging the need of camera movement in directions of interest for the robot task. Environment maps may be built for an implementation of strategies of more autonomous navigations. In this work a methodology is developed for building maps for robot navigations, which are the representation of the environment geometry. The map contains the information received by a stereo omnidirectional catadioptric sensor built by a camera and a hyperbolic mirror. For the map building, the processes of alignment, registration and integration are performed using metric of angular difference and distance between the points. From the fusion of local maps a global map of the environment is created. The method developed in this work for global map building allows to be coupled with algorithms of path planning, self-location and free space estimation, so that autonomous robot navigation can be obtained. (AU)