Panoramic representations of scenes around a point

Presents a new sensing method, an omnidirectional stereo, to observe the environment around the robot. The omnidirectional stereo realized by swiveling a camera on the robot precisely yields a 2(1/2)D panoramic representation, a high resolution omnidirectional view with range estimates, of the world around the observation point. The panoramic representation is efficient as the vision of the mobile robot. An application of the panoramic representations in global map making by the mobile robot is discussed