Combining Dense Structure From Motion and Visual SLAM in a Behavior-Based Robot Control Architecture

In this paper, we present a control architecture for an intelligent outdoor mobile robot. This enables therobot to navigate in a complex, natural outdoor environment, relying on only a single on-board camera as sensoryinput. This is achieved through a twofold analysis of the visual data stream: a dense structure from motionalgorithm calculates a depth map of the environment and a visual simultaneous localization and mappingalgorithm builds a map of the surroundings using image features. This information enables a behavior-based robotmotion and path planner to navigate the robot through the environment. In this paper, we show the theoreticalaspects of setting up this architecture