Stereo omnidirectional vision for a hopping robot

This paper proposes a new geometrical structure for stereoscopic vision using omnidirectional cameras. The motivation of this work comes from the desire to equip a small hopping robot with an efficient and robust vision system to perform self localization during exploration missions. Because of size and weight constraints, we selected the Panoramic Annular Lens, for which no geometric model of stereo configuration was available. The paper describes the geometrical optical properties of the single lens and proposes a configuration for doing stereo vision with this lens. The analitical properties as well as the requirements of the complete system are discussed in the paper.