Title: Pose estimation and map building with a Time-Of-Flight-camera for robot navigation

Authors: A. Prusak, O. Melnychuk, H. Roth, I. Schiller, R. Koch

Addresses: Institute of Automatic Control Engineering, University of Siegen, Siegen 57068, Germany. ' Institute of Automatic Control Engineering, University of Siegen, Siegen 57068, Germany. ' Institute of Automatic Control Engineering, University of Siegen, Siegen 57068, Germany. ' Institute of Computer Science, Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel, Kiel 24098, Germany. ' Institute of Computer Science, Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel, Kiel 24098, Germany

Abstract: In this paper, we describe a joint approach for robot navigation with collision avoidance, pose estimation and map building with a 2.5D Photonic Mixer Device (PMD)-camera combined with a high-resolution spherical camera. The cameras are mounted at the front of the robot with a certain inclination angle. The navigation and map building consists of two steps: when entering new terrain the robot first scans the surrounding. Simultaneously a 3D-panorama is generated from the PMD-images. In the second step, the robot moves along the pre-defined path, using the PMD-camera for collision avoidance and a combined Structure-from-Motion (SfM) and model-tracking approach for self-localisation. The computed poses of the robot are simultaneously used for map building with new measurements from the PMD-camera.

Keywords: 3D maps; pose estimation; robot navigation; SLAM; self-localisation; localisation; mapping; SfM; structure-from-motion; map building; time-of-flight; TOF camera; robot vision; collision avoidance; photonic mixer device; PMD camera; model tracking.

DOI: 10.1504/IJISTA.2008.021298

International Journal of Intelligent Systems Technologies and Applications, 2008 Vol.5 No.3/4, pp.355 - 364

Published online: 18 Nov 2008 *

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