Intelligent Indoor Mobile Robot Navigation Using Stereo Vision

TL;DR

This paper presents a cost-effective stereo vision system combined with ultrasound sensors to enable indoor mobile robots to navigate and map unknown environments effectively.

Contribution

It introduces an experimental stereo vision approach integrated with ultrasound sensors for obstacle avoidance and mapping in indoor robot navigation.

Findings

Successful obstacle avoidance in complex environments

Effective 2D topological mapping of unknown spaces

Stereo vision models 3D environment structure

Abstract

Majority of the existing robot navigation systems, which facilitate the use of laser range finders, sonar sensors or artificial landmarks, has the ability to locate itself in an unknown environment and then build a map of the corresponding environment. Stereo vision, while still being a rapidly developing technique in the field of autonomous mobile robots, are currently less preferable due to its high implementation cost. This paper aims at describing an experimental approach for the building of a stereo vision system that helps the robots to avoid obstacles and navigate through indoor environments and at the same time remaining very much cost effective. This paper discusses the fusion techniques of stereo vision and ultrasound sensors which helps in the successful navigation through different types of complex environments. The data from the sensor enables the robot to create the two dimensional topological map of unknown environments and stereo vision systems models the three dimension model of the same environment.