Real-time kinematics for accurate geolocalization of images in telerobotic applications

The paper discusses a real-time kinematic system for accurate geolocalization of images, acquired though stereoscopic cameras mounted on a robot, particularly a teleoperated machinery. A teleoperated vehicle may be used to explore an unsafe environment and to acquire in real-time stereoscopic images through two cameras mounted on top of it. Each camera has a visible image sensor. For night operation, or in case temperature is an important parameter, each camera can be equipped with both visible and infrared image sensors. One of the main issues for telerobotic is the real-time and accurate geolocalization of the images, where an accuracy of few cm is required. Such value is much better than that that provided by GPS (Global Positioning System), which is in the order of few meters. To this aim, a real-time kinematic system is proposed which acquires the GPS signal of the vehicle, plus through an RF channel, the GPS signal of a reference base station, geolocalized with a cm-accuracy. To improve the robustness of the differential GPS system, also the data of an Inertial Measurement Unit are used. Another issue addressed in this paper is the real-time implementation of a stereoscopic image-processing algorithm to recover the 3D structure of the scene. The focus is on the 3D reconstruction of the scene to have the reference trajectory for the actuation done by a robotic arm with a proper end-effector