Non-pixel Robot Stereo

The 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge was a 213 Km robot race across the Mojave Desert between Nevada and California. Our team attempted to run the course using only stereo vision. I designed a novel real-time large-image stereo vision system that uses sparse stereo and is biologically inspired. It uses a filter similar to that used in primary visual cortex to locate small line segments. These are then arranged to form a polyline representation of the scene and estimate the depth. The technique was capable of nine frames per second of a megapixel image on a single processor. Accuracy was questionable and the robot did not compete in the race for other reasons