An Omnidirectional Vision System for Outdoor Mobile Robots

The advancements made in microprocessor and image sensory technology have made inexpensive, fast and robust computers and high resolution cameras widely available. This opens up many new possibilities as researchers can now take advantage of the rich visual information of the environment provided by the vision system. However, conventional cameras have a limited field of view, which is a constraint for certain applications in computational vision. As a result, the use of omnidirectional vision systems have become more prevalent within the robotics community in recent years. In this paper, a novel variable multibaseline stereo omnidirectional vision system and its algorithms intended for outdoor navigation will be presented.