Utilization of Depth and Color Information in Mobile Robotics

Computer vision plays an increasing role in robotics, as the computing power of modern computers grows year by year allowing more advanced algorithms to be implemented. Along with visual information, depth is also widely used in navigation of mobile robots, for example for obstacle detection. As cheap depth sensors become popular nowadays, there is a possibility to use data from both sources to further enhance the processes of navigation and object detection. This article presents some possibilities of utilizing in mobile robotics the integrated video and depth images - by performing image segmentation for environment description, optical flow estimation for obstacle avoidance and object detection for semantic map creation. All of the presented examples are based on real, working applications, which additionally proves validity of proposed methods.

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