Stereo Vision System on Programmable Chip (SVSoC) for Small Robot Navigation

In this paper, we present a stereo vision system on programmable chip (SVSoC) for dense depth mapping and obstacle detection at video rate. The system is composed of three miniature CMOS cameras with triangular configuration and one FPGA chip for parallel computing. The system algorithm contains nonlinear iteration based cooperative algorithm for high quality dense depth mapping, ground extraction and obstacle location from dense depth maps. With the connection of DSP for moving control, the system is mounted on small hexapod robot for obstacle avoidance and navigation