Obstacle detection in smooth high curvature terrain

Detection of obstacles for autonomous vehicles is more difficult when the terrain is not locally planar and remains an open problem. We have developed an approach suited for obstacle detection in those cases where the terrain has significant curvature but is smooth enough that the obstacles are discrete. Our system consists of a low-cost scanning laser rangefinder and a novel algorithm that can reliably detect obstacles as small as 15 cm in curving terrain. This paper presents an analysis of the effectiveness of our system and a summary of experimental results from an outdoor mobile robot.

[1]  Reid G. Simmons,et al.  Stereo vision based navigation for Sun-synchronous exploration , 2002, IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[2]  Illah R. Nourbakhsh,et al.  Appearance-Based Obstacle Detection with Monocular Color Vision , 2000, AAAI/IAAI.

[3]  Robin R. Murphy,et al.  Cooperative Navigation of Micro-Rovers Using Color Segmentation , 1999, Proceedings 1999 IEEE International Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Robotics and Automation. CIRA'99 (Cat. No.99EX375).

[4]  Marilyn N. Abrams,et al.  Concealment and Obstacle Detection for Autonomous Driving , 1999 .

[5]  Roberto Manduchi,et al.  Terrain perception for DEMO III , 2000, Proceedings of the IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium 2000 (Cat. No.00TH8511).

[6]  Robert Mandelbaum,et al.  Real-time stereo processing, obstacle detection, and terrain estimation from vehicle-mounted stereo cameras , 1998, Proceedings Fourth IEEE Workshop on Applications of Computer Vision. WACV'98 (Cat. No.98EX201).

[7]  Marilyn N. Abrams,et al.  Concealment and Obstacle Detection for Autonomous Driving | NIST , 1999 .

[8]  Larry S. Davis,et al.  Efficient Algorithms for Obstacle Detection Using Range Data , 1990, Comput. Vis. Graph. Image Process..

[9]  Sanjiv Singh,et al.  Obstacle detection using adaptive color segmentation and color stereo homography , 2001, Proceedings 2001 ICRA. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.01CH37164).

[10]  D. Fox,et al.  Towards Personal Service Robots for the Elderly , 1999 .

[11]  Martial Hebert,et al.  Active laser radar for high-performance measurements , 1998, Proceedings. 1998 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.98CH36146).

[12]  Massimo Bertozzi,et al.  Stereo inverse perspective mapping: theory and applications , 1998, Image Vis. Comput..

[13]  Dean A. Pomerleau,et al.  Overtaking vehicle detection using implicit optical flow , 1999 .

[14]  Hanspeter A. Mallot,et al.  Visual obstacle detection for automatically guided vehicles , 1990, Proceedings., IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[15]  D. Langer,et al.  Fusing radar and vision for detecting, classifying and avoiding roadway obstacles , 1996, Proceedings of Conference on Intelligent Vehicles.