Heterogeneous sensor fusion framework for autonomous mobile robot obstacle avoidance

This paper addresses the problem of moving obstacle detection for autonomous mobile robots in unknown urban environments through the fusion of (vehicle-mounted) forward looking laser and vision sensors. In this approach we reparameterize the 2D gaussian distribution of the laser free-configuration eigenspaces by vision saliency gaussian kernel function. The approach uses bi-sensor paradigm to achieve greater effective mapping of the environment and improved accuracy in obstacle position estimation. Where the laser lower dimensional manifolds provide an eigenvector which corresponds to the free configuration space of the high order geometric representation of the environment and vision based edge detection followed by the saliency mapping provides the road detection and existance of dynamic obstacles on the road. We have shown that while the vectorial combination of eigenvectors at discrete time scan-frames of laser data manifest a trajectory, and once followed and fused with the vision sensor data, enables mobile robot to build an efficient and accurate online environment map free of obstacles. We demonstrated this process using real-time NAVLAB CMU (Autonomous Jeep's) data-set which is a good representation of autonomous mobile robot's navigation in an urban environment.