3-D Vision Techniques for Autonomous Vehicles

A mobile robot is a vehicle that navigates autonomously through an unknown or partially known environment. Research in the field of mobile robots has received considerable attention in the past decade due to its wide range of potential applications, from surveillance to planetary exploration, and the research opportunities it provides, including virtually the whole spectrum of robotics research from vehicle control to symbolic planning (see for example [Har88b] for an analysis of the research issues in mobile robots). In this paper we present our investigation of some the issues in one of the components of mobile robots: perception. The role of perception in mobile robots is to transform data from sensors into representations that can be used by the decision-making components of the system. The simplest example is the detection of potentially dangerous regions in the environment (i. e. obstacles) that can be used by a path planner whose role is to generate safe trajectories for the vehicle. An example of a more complex situation is a mission that requires the recognition of specific landmarks, in which case the perception components must produce complex descriptions of the sensed environment and relate them to stored models of the landmarks.