Fusion of Lidar and Stereo Range for Mobile Robots

This project involves the use of two physical sensors and several modular algorithms to generate a single spatial representation of obstacles and free-space surrounding a mobile robot. This representation is used to track obstacles over time. We define a unified architecture that utilized a spatial object representation as the default communication conduit between all modules. This representation includes an occupancy grid of the area immediately surrounding the robot, along with geometric scaling and density information, and confidence estimates for these data. The flexibility of this architecture has been demonstrated by utilizing both live and recorded data sets from different lidar sensors, cameras, and processing modules, with minimal or no changes to the