Papers by Keyword: Omni-Directional Vision

Abstract: Vision system can obtain rich environmental information, and vision is one of the most important sensing methods for mobile robot navigation and positioning. An omni-directional vision system using laser illumination is presented. The system can obtain the distance information of the obstacles around the mobile robot by only one image. The principle of the vision system is expounded; the mapping relationship between the image plane and the laser plane is given based on the analysis of the system model. The system benefits from the advantages of the omni-directional vision and the structured light vision, such as large ranged environmental information, high precision and robustness, etc. Experimental results of measurement and map construction verify the vision system.

Abstract: A new SLAM measurement model based on omni-directional vision and odometer is proposed in this paper. A virtual stereo vision composed of an omni-directional vision sensor and an odometer. Scale Invariant Feature Transform is used to extract stable and available vision features from the omni-images. The 3-D locations of these features are initialized by the pixel coordinates and the odometer data by stereo projection, and the locations will be corrected during the SLAM process when they are observed again. It is demonstrated that the new model can make a good accuracy with FastSLAM algorithm, and the accuracy is greatly improved corresponding to the classical vision sensor.

Abstract: The Walking Assistant Robots(WARs) developed by our institute are introduced in this paper. First, three prototypes with different mechanical and control structures are introduced and compared. Then as for the prototypes Ⅲ, its main framework and three important function modules including force sensor based human-machine interaction, Omni-directional vision based tracking and guiding system, and web-based monitoring system are described in detail. The WAR can recognize the user’s intents and execute different assistant functions, such as seating or standing-up assistant, walking assistant, human tracking, location, obstacle detection and avoidance. The application in an elderly care center shows WAR has a perfect and stable performance.