Pushbroom stereo for high-speed navigation in cluttered environments

• Main Authors: Barry, Andrew J. (Contributor), Tedrake, Russell Louis (Contributor)
• Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (Contributor), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (Contributor)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 2016-02-03T16:27:48Z.
• Subjects: Article
• Online Access: Get fulltext

We present a novel stereo vision algorithm that is capable of obstacle detection on a mobile ARM processor at 120 frames per second. Our system performs a subset of standard block-matching stereo processing, searching only for obstacles at a single depth. By using an onboard IMU and state-estimator, we can recover the position of obstacles at all other depths, building and updating a local depth-map at framerate. Here, we describe both the algorithm and our implementation on a high-speed, small UAV, flying at over 20 MPH (9 m/s) close to obstacles. The system requires no external sensing or computation and is, to the best of our knowledge, the first high-framerate stereo detection system running onboard a small UAV.
United States. Office of Naval Research. Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (Grant N00014-09-1-1051)
National Science Foundation (U.S.). Graduate Research Fellowship