Distributed vision and 3D data fusion for mobile platform navigation

Efficient navigation of mobile platforms in dynamic, human centered environments is still an open research topic. We have already proposed an architecture (MEPHISTO) for a navigation system that should be able to fulfill the main requirements of efficient navigation: fast and reliable sensor processing, extensive global world modeling and distributed path planning. Our architecture uses a distributed system of sensor processing, world modeling and path planning units. In this paper we present some implemented methods in the context of distributed vision, the corresponding data fusion algorithms and the resulting 3D world model. We also show some experimental results of the implementation.