A new catadioptric sensor for the panoramic vision of mobile robots

Classical video cameras have a limited field of view that makes them unsuitable for many applications. We present in this paper a new panoramic vision system developed for mobile platforms. This system allows a normal vision on the front, the 360° perception of the environment is completed by a mirror. The system has the advantage of allowing the use of classical methods usually applied to perspective projection images for all kind of tasks like navigation, autocalibration, reconstruction. Classical panoramic sensors based on mirrors produce highly distorted images, our sensor has been developed to avoid the use of special pre-processing steps. We will explain all along this paper the concept of this new sensor, its calibration methods and how to generate a 360° image