Platform Relative Sensor Abstractions across Mobile Robots Using Computer Vision and Sensor Integration

Uniform sensor management and abstraction across different robot platforms is a difficult task due to the sheer diversity of sensing devices. However, because these sensors can be grouped into categories that in essence provide the same information, we can capture their similarities and create abstractions. An example would be distance data measured by an assortment of range sensors, or alternatively extracted from a camera using image processing. This paper describes how using software components it is possible to uniformly construct high-level abstractions of sensor information across various robots in a way to support the portability of common code that uses these abstractions (e.g. obstacle avoidance, wall following). We demonstrate our abstractions on a number of robots using different configurations of range sensors and cameras.