Research on mobile robot mapping on binocular stereo vision system

Mapping is an important research direction in the field of robot navigation. Map represents the robot´s working environment has very important effect on localization and path planning. Vision sensor is simple and reliable, and has been widely used in the field of mapping. The paper introduces the process in which the binocular stereo vision system is adapted to imitate the double eyes of mankind in order to realize computer vision. The autonomous mapping algorithm in this paper is based on GSOM (Growing Self-organizing Map) algorithm. By continuously increasing new neurons in the growth of network scale, the GSOM mapping algorithm applies a small number of SOM neurons to generate a topologic map describing the environmental characteristics. The experimental results show that: we applied GSOM algorithm to autonomously generate a topological map, which was accurately described by a small number of SOM neurons.