Occlusions in obstacle detection for safe navigation

Obstacles detection is essential to safe autonomous platform navigation. The obstacle detection methods proposed in the literature do not pay sufficient attention to the occlusion-problem caused by the existence of regions along the trajectory of a vehicle that are hidden by other objects and where potential obstacles might be located. Our approach takes occlusions into account to prevent the possibility of collision. Experimental results with a robotic platform demonstrating the effectiveness of the developed algorithm are presented.