Artificial Vision for Mobile Robots

Book excerpt: To give mobile robots real autonomy, and to permit them to act efficiently in a diverse, cluttered, and changing environment, they must be equipped with powerful tools for perception and reasoning. Artificial Vision for Mobile Robots presents new theoretical and practical tools useful for providing mobile robots with artificial vision in three dimensions, including passive binocular and trinocular stereo vision, local and global 3D map reconstructions, fusion of local 3D maps into a global 3D map, 3D navigation, control of uncertainty, and strategies of perception. Numerous examples from research carried out at INRIA with the Esprit Depth and Motion Analysis project are presented in a clear and concise manner. Nicolas Ayache is Research Director at INRIA, Le Chesnay, France. Contents. General Introduction. Stereo Vision. Introduction. Calibration. Image Representation. Binocular Stereo Vision Constraints. Binocular Stereo Vision Algorithms. Experiments in Binocular Stereo Vision. Trinocular Stereo Vision, Outlook. Multisensory Perception. Introduction. A Unified Formalism. Geometric Representation. Construction of Visual Maps. Combining Visual Maps. Results: Matching and Motion. Results: Matching and Fusion. Outlook.