A navigation system based upon panoramic representation

A navigation system based upon panoramic representation is explored in this paper. The panoramic representation is an intermediate 2(1/2)D representation which is transformed from an image sequence taken continuously by a camera on a mobile robot. While iconic information is contained in a panoramic view, estimating the disparity of feature points by image processing costs a lot of computation. Here the authors´ system obtains disparity values quickly by an active method. The system is constructed by a mobile robot mounted with cameras and slit light projectors. A camera and a projector are directed toward the ground in front of the robot to detect obstacles while other cameras and projectors are directed to two sides for acquiring the panoramic representation of two side scenes. The robot can move freely in an indoor environment and the preliminary experimental results on acquiring environment maps along a closed path are given