Using trinocular vision to build a real-time world model

The Department of Energy (DOE) in the USA, in its effort to clean up and shut down many of its radioactive facilities, would like to use robots to enhance efficiency and limit worker exposure to hazardous substances. Unlike industry, where the work environment is designed to facilitate robots, the DOE applications often have unknown, unstructured work areas. The paper describes an approach to use a trinocular image processing system to build a real time, simple representation of the objects in the workspace. This representation is needed for safe navigation as well as for manipulation of the objects in the workspace.