Vision-based localization, map building and obstacle reconstruction in ground plane environments

The work described in this thesis develops the theory of 3D obstacle reconstruction and map building problems in the context of a robot, or a team of robots, equipped with one camera mounted on board. The study is composed of many problems representing the different phases of actions taken by the robot. This thesis first studies the problem of image matching for wide baseline images taken by moving robots. The ground plane is detected and the inter-image homography induced by the ground plane is calculated. A novel technique for ground plane matching is introduced using the overhead view transformation. The thesis then studies the simultaneous localization and map building (SLAM) problem for a team of robots collaborating in the same work site. A vision-based technique is introduced in this thesis to solve the SLAM problem. The third problem studied in this thesis is the 3D obstacle reconstruction of the obstacles lying on the ground surface. In this thesis a Geometric/Variational level set method is proposed to reconstruct the obstacles detected by the robots