SLAM with omni-directional stereo vision sensor

Vision sensors are attractive equipments for an autonomous mobile robot because they are information-rich and rarely have restrictions in range and various applications. However, there exists a difficult problem in using vision sensors to reconstruct geometrical information, which is a correspondence or matching problem. We present a simultaneous localization and map building (SLAM) algorithm for an autonomous mobile robot based on a vision sensor robust to the correspondence or matching problem with cooperation of structure from motion (SFM) and stereo. We use an omni-directional stereo vision sensor, which is suitable for SLAM. Due to its large field of view, we can acquire robust estimates and reduce the effect of motion drift from the fiducial coordinate frame. Results on real images illustrate the performance of the proposed method.