An omnidirectional stereoscopic system for mobile robot navigation

This paper proposes a scheme for a 3D metric reconstruction of the environment of a mobile robot. We first introduce the advantages of a catadioptric stereovision sensor for autonomous navigation and how we have designed it with respect to the Single Viewpoint constraint. For applications such as path generation, the robot needs a metric reconstruction of its environment, so calibration of the sensor is required. After justification of the chosen model, a calibration method to obtain the model parameters and the relative pose of the two catadioptric sensors is presented. Knowledge of all the sensor parameters yields the 3D metric reconstruction of the environment by triangulation. Tools for calibration and relative pose estimation are presented and are available on the authorpsilas Web page. The entire process has been evaluated using real data.