An active trinocular vision system for sensing mobile robot navigation environments

Intelligent autonomous mobile robots must be able to sense and recognize 3D indoor space where they live or work. In this paper, we propose a new 3D sensing system using the laser structured lighting method, because of its robustness on the nature of the navigation environment and the easy extraction of feature information of interest. The proposed active trinocular vision system is composed of a flexible multi-stripe laser projector and two cameras arranged with a triangular shape. Based on the virtual camera concept and the trinocular epipolar constraints, the matching pairs of line features in two real camera images are established, and 3D information from one-shot image can be extracted on the patterned scene. Especially, for robust line feature matching, we propose a new correspondence matching algorithms based on line grouping and probabilistic voting. Finally, a series of experimental tests is performed to show its efficiency and accuracy.