A New 3D Sensor System by Using Virtual Camera Model and Stereo Vision for Mobile Robots

So many researches have been conducted to develop 3D sensing method for mobile robots. Among them, the optical triangulation, a well-known method for 3D shape measurement, is also based on active vision sensing principle for mobile robot sensor system, so that the measurement result is robust to illumination noises from environments. Due to this advantage it has been popularly used. However, to obtain the 3D information of environment needs a special scanning process and scanning actuators need. To omit this scanning process multi-line projection methods have been widely researched. However, they suffer from an inherent limitation: The results of multi-line projection method commonly have measurement errors because of 2 -ambiguity caused by regularly repeated multiline laser pattern. In this paper, to overcome 2 -ambiguity effectively, we introduce a novel sensing method for a 3D sensing system using multi-line projection and stereo cameras, based on the virtual camera model and stereovision algorithm. To verify the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed method, a series of experimental tests is performed.