Design of a novel stereo vision navigation system for mobile robots

This paper presents a design method for a novel configured stereo vision navigation system for mobile robots, which is a catadioptric sensor called OSVOD (omnidirectional stereo vision optical device) based on a common perspective camera coupled with two hyperbolic mirrors. As the hyperbolic mirrors ensure a single viewpoint (SVP) the incident light rays are easily found from the points of the image. In OSVOD the two hyperbolic mirrors, which aligned coaxially and separately, share one focus that coincides with the camera center. So the geometry of OSVOD naturally ensures matched epipolar lines in the two images of the scene. The separation between the two mirrors provides a large baseline and eventually leads to a precise result. The properties mentioned above make OSVOD especially suitable for omnidirectional stereo vision because depth estimation is simple, fast and precise. This proposed system can be used for detecting obstacles by mobile robots, automatic mapping of environments and machine vision where fast and real-time calculations are needed