The Single Frame Stereo Vision System for Reliable Obstacle Detection Used during the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge on TerraMax

Autonomous driving in off-road environments requires an exceptionally capable sensor system, especially given that the unstructured environment does not provide many of the cues available in on-road environments. This paper presents a variable-width-baseline (up to 1.5 meters) single-frame stereo vision system for obstacle detection that can meet the needs of autonomous navigation in extreme environments. Efforts to maximize computational speed oth in the attention given to accurate and stable calibration and the exploitation of the processors MMX and SSE instruction sets - allow a guaranteed 15 fps rate. Along with the assured speed, the system proves very robust against false positives. The system has been field tested on the TerraMax vehicle, one of only five vehicles to complete the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge course and the only one to do so using a vision system for obstacle detection