Title :
Monocular visual navigation of an autonomous vehicle in natural scene corridor-like environments
Author :
Zhang, Ji ; Kantor, George ; Bergerman, Marcel ; Singh, Sanjiv
Author_Institution :
Robot. Inst., Carnegie Mellon Univ., Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Abstract :
We present a monocular visual navigation methodology for autonomous orchard vehicles. Modern orchards are usually planted with straight and parallel tree rows that form a corridor-like environment. Our task consists of driving a vehicle autonomously along the tree rows. The original contributions of this paper are: 1) a method to recover vehicle rotation independently of translation by modeling the vehicle as a car-like robot driving on a 3D ground surface-the rotation is estimated from monocular images while the translation is measured by a wheel encoder; and 2) a method to fit the 3D points corresponding to the trees into straight lines via an optimization algorithm that minimizes the error variance on the robot lookahead point. Additionally, we use a simple vanishing point detection approach to find the ends of the tree rows. The vanishing point detection is integrated into the system via an extended Kalman filter. The methodology´s robustness to environmental changes is validated in more than fifty experiments in research and commercial orchards, six of which are presented and discussed in detail.
Keywords :
Kalman filters; mobile robots; optimisation; robot vision; 3D ground surface; autonomous orchard vehicles; corridor-like environment; extended Kalman filter; monocular visual navigation; natural scene corridor-like environments; optimization algorithm; robot lookahead point; vanishing point detection approach; Cameras; Image reconstruction; Mobile robots; Robot kinematics; Robot vision systems; Vegetation;
Conference_Titel :
Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2012 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on
Conference_Location :
Vilamoura
Print_ISBN :
978-1-4673-1737-5
DOI :
10.1109/IROS.2012.6385479