Local path planning in image space for autonomous robot navigation in unstructured environments

An approach to stereo based local path planning in unstructured environments is presented. The approach differs from previous stereo based and image based planning systems (e.g. top-down occupancy grid planners, autonomous highway driving algorithms, and view-sequenced route representation), in that it uses specialized cost functions to find paths through an occupancy grid representation of the world directly in the image plane and forgoes a projection of cost information from the image plane down onto a top-down 2D Cartesian cost map. We discuss three cost metrics for path selection in image space. We present a basic image based planning system, discuss its susceptibility to rotational and translational oscillation, and present and implement two extensions to the basic system that overcome these limitations - a cylindrical based image system and a hierarchical planning system. All three systems are implemented in an autonomous robot and are tested against a standard top-down 2D Cartesian planning system on three outdoor courses of varying difficulty. We find that the basic image based planning system fails under certain conditions; however, the cylindrical based system is well suited to the task of local path planning and for use as a high resolution local planning component of a hierarchical planning system.