Camera platforms for localization and map building

Vision is useful for the autonomous navigation of vehicles. In this paper the case of a vehicle equipped with multiple cameras with non-overlapping views is considered. The geometry and algebra of such a moving platform of cameras are considered. In particular we formulate and solve structure and motion problems for a few novel cases of such moving platforms. For the case of two-dimensional retina cameras (ordinary cameras) there are two minimal cases of three points in two platform positions and two points in three platform positions. In the paper it is also discussed how classical algorithms such as intersection and resection can be extended to this new situation. We also present a system for feature detection, tracking and structure and motion estimation for such platforms. The theory has been tested on synthetic and real data with promising results.