A new 3D sensing method based on stereo PMP technique for mobile robots

Intelligent autonomous mobile robots must be able to sense and recognize 3D environment for navigation and task execution where they live or work. To achieve this, a variety of techniques have been developed for the determination of the 3D geometric information such as stereo vision, laser structured light, laser range finder and so on. However, these methods have several limitations such as susceptibility to noise, low resolution, measurement error in 3D scene. In this paper to overcome these problems we introduce a new sensing method based upon stereo vision methodology which utilizes not only intensity information but also phase information. The novelty of this suggested method comes from the fact that it uses the stereo phase information from the PMP technique together with intensity information captured by stereo image. To verify the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed method, a series of experimental tests is performed. The results show that it greatly enhances correspondence matching performance and measurement resolution.