Real-Time Simultaneous Localization and Mapping using a Wide-Angle Stereo Camera and Adaptive Patches

This paper presents a new method for real-time ego-motion calculation applied to the location/orientation of a cheap wide-angle stereo camera in a 3D environment. The objective is to apply it to a mobile robot navigation system. To achieve that, the goal is to solve the simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) problem. Our approach consists in the 3D sequential mapping of natural landmarks by means of a stereo camera, which also provides means to obtain the camera location/orientation. The dynamic behavior is modeled using a top-down Bayesian method. The results show a comparison between our system and a monocular visual SLAM system using a hand-waved camera. Several improvements related to no priori environment knowledge requirements, lower processing time (real-time constrained) and higher robustness is presented