Omnidirectional Vision Simulation and Robot Localisation

Abstract

Most work that is carried out for omnidirectional robot vision is done on real hardware, with expensive mirrors. In this paper a robot simulator with accurate omnidirectional vision capability is presented. Vertically aligned co-axial omnistereo vision with two conical mirrors (Spacek, 2005) is tested using the simulator. Experiments are performed to calculate the distance to six objects and the results are compared to the known distances. The calculated distances are then used in a simple natural landmark based localisation algorithm, and the estimated position of the robot is compared to the actual position.