Method of Improving Positioning Accuracy of Mobile Robot Based on Stereo Camera

This paper proposes the method for improving the localization accuracy of the mobile robot based on the stereo camera. To restore the position information from stereo images obtained by the stereo camera, the corresponding point which corresponds to one pixel on the left image should be found on the right image. For this, there is the general method to search for corresponding point by calculating the similarity of pixel with pixels on the epipolar line. However, there are some disadvantages because all pixels on the epipolar line should be calculated and the similarity is calculated by only pixel value like RGB color space. To make up for this weak point, this paper implements the method to search for the corresponding point simply by calculating the gap of x-coordinate when the feature points, which are extracted by feature extraction and matched by feature matching method, are a pair and located on the same y-coordinate on the left/right image. In addition, the proposed method tries to preserve the number of feature points as much as possible by finding the corresponding points through the conventional algorithm in case of unmatched features. Because the number of the feature points has effect on the accuracy of the localization. The position of the mobile robot is compensated based on 3-D coordinates of the features which are restored by the feature points and corresponding points. As experimental results, by the proposed method, the number of the feature points are increased for compensating the position and the position of the mobile robot can be compensated more than only feature extraction.