Realization of a 3D vision mobile robot that can avoid collision with moving obstacles

The authors present a real-time visual system for avoiding collision with moving obstacles and describe a realization of robots using the system to avoid collisions with moving objects. The visual sensor used in this system is a passive optical stereo type having no mechanical moving parts. Using two special slit patterns, the sensor is configured so as to split the two images obtained by individual cameras placed on the right and left, and to project the split images onto one CCD sensor, providing some 200 autofocusing subsystems. These subsystems can operate independently of one another, making real-time processing possible