Visual robot navigation using flat earth obstacle projection

Autonomous robot navigation requires the solution of several problems like obstacle avoidance and road following. Traditionally, the problem of obstacle avoidance has been solved by using range information acquired through some form of range measurements like laser range cameras or vision based range estimation. This paper presents a novel approach for obstacle avoidance which does not require true range measurement. Obstacle information is acquired using a single color camera. Detected obstacles are projected into 3D grid derived from the camera geometry and a locally flat earth model for the terrain. A weighted polar histogram technique is used to generate the vehicle steering angle based on the current grid information.