Multi-Range approach of stereo vision for mobile robot navigation in uncertain environments

The detection of free spaces between obstacles in a scene is a prerequisite for navigation of a mobile robot. Especially for stereo vision-based navigation, the problem of correspondence between two images is well known to be of crucial importance. This paper describes multi-range approach of area-based stereo matching for grid mapping and visual navigation in uncertain environment. Camera calibration parameters are optimized by evolutionary algorithm for successful stereo matching. To obtain reliable disparity information from both images, stereo images are to be decomposed into three pairs of images with different resolution based on measurement of disparities. The advantage of multi-range approach is that we can get more reliable disparity in each defined range because disparities from high resolution image are used for farther object a while disparities from low resolution images are used for close objects. The reliable disparity map is combined through post-processing for rejecting incorrect disparity information from each disparity map. The real distance from a disparity image is converted into an occupancy grid representation of a mobile robot. We have investigated the possibility of multi-range approach for the detection of obstacles and visual mapping through various experiments.