Title
Using Laser And Vision To Locate A Robot In An Industrial Environment: A Practical Experience
Abstract
The fully flexible navigation of autonomous vehicles in industrial environments is still unsolved. It is hard to conciliate strict precision requirements with quick adaptivity to new settings without undergoing costly rearrangements. We are pursuing a research project trying to combine the precision of laser-based local positioning with the flexibility of vision-based robot motion estimation. An enhanced circle approach to dynamic triangulation combining laser and odometric signals has been used to improve positioning accuracy. As regards to vision, a novel technique relating the deformation of contours in an image sequence to the 3D motion underwent by the camera has been developed. Interestingly, contours are fitted to objects already present in the environment, without requiring any presetting. In this paper, we describe a practical experience conducted in the warehouse of a beer production factory in Barcelona. A database containing the laser readings, image sequences and robot odometry along several trajectories was compiled, and subsequently processed off-line in order to assess the accuracies of both techniques under a variety of circumstances. In all, vision-based estimation turned out to be about one order of magnitude less precise than laser-based positioning, which qualifies the vision-based technique as a promising alternative to accomplish robot transfers across long distances, such as those needed in a warehouse, while backing up on laser-based positioning when accurate docking for loading and unloading operations is needed.
Year
DOI
Venue
2005
10.1109/ROBOT.2005.1570656
2005 IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ROBOTICS AND AUTOMATION (ICRA), VOLS 1-4
Keywords
Field
DocType
navigation,mobile robots,motion estimation,vehicle dynamics,remotely operated vehicles
Remotely operated underwater vehicle,Computer vision,Odometry,Laser,Control engineering,Triangulation (social science),Vehicle dynamics,Artificial intelligence,Engineering,Motion estimation,Robot,Mobile robot
Conference
Volume
Issue
ISSN
2005
1
1050-4729
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
7
0.73
8
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Guillem Alenyà121927.43
Josep Escoda2101.56
Antonio B. Martínez Velasco3216.15
Carme Torras41155115.66