Autonomous indoor passageway finding using 3D scene reconstruction with stereo vision

This paper investigates an algorithm that navigates a robot in an unknown environment with a stereo vision system. Different from a common application that computes the distance between the robot and a landmark, our research intends to autonomously find an opening, such as a hallway or a window, for the robot to pass. We first perform the color space transformation, and perform the 3D scene reconstruction in the gray-scale space. The sum of squared differences (SSD) algorithm is applied to match pixels and estimate the shifting distances. An algorithm is proposed to determine the passageway of the environment for the guidance purpose. Experiments are presented to demonstrate the validity of our research. The result of the research is especially applicable to surveil a robot in an unknown building or an indoor disaster site.