Real-time Omni-directional Distance Measurement with Active Panoramic Vision*

Autonomous navigation of mobile robot requires a ranging system for measurement of distance to environmental objects. It is obvious that the wider and the faster distance measurement gives a mobile robot more freedom in trajectory planning and control. The active omni-directional ranging system proposed in this paper is capable of obtaining the distance for all 3600 directions in real-time because of the omni-directional mirror and the structured light. Distance computation including the sensitivity analysis and the experiments on the omnidirectional ranging are presented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed system.