Stereo vision-based obstacle avoidance for micro air vehicles using an egocylindrical image space representation

Abstract

Micro air vehicles which operate autonomously at low altitude in cluttered environments require a method for onboard obstacle avoidance for safe operation. Previous methods deploy either purely reactive approaches, mapping low-level visual features directly to actuator inputs to maneuver the vehicle around the obstacle, or deliberative methods that use on-board 3-D sensors to create a 3-D, voxel-based world model, which is then used to generate collision free 3-D trajectories. In this paper, we use forward-looking stereo vision with a large horizontal and vertical field of view and project range from stereo into a novel robot-centered, cylindrical, inverse range map we call an egocylinder. With this implementation we reduce the complexity of our world representation from a 3D map to a 2.5D image-space representation, which supports very efficient motion planning and collisionchecking, and allows to implement configuration space expansion as an image processing function directly on the egocylinder. Deploying a fast reactive motion planner directly on the configuration space expanded egocylinder image, we demonstrate the effectiveness of this new approach experimentally in an indoor environment.

Obstacle Detection Based on Heterogeneous Data Fusion

“…Usage of vision sensors can avoid such problems [8,9,10]. Visual detection systems can usually include one or two cameras [11]. In measuring the distance of obstacles, the accuracy of the visual sensor is not as good as ultrasonic and infrared sensors.…”