A practical obstacle detection and avoidance system

A practical real-time system for passive obstacle detection and avoidance is presented. Range information is obtained from stereo images by rst computing a disparity picture from the image pair and extracting points above the ground plane. Then these points are projected onto the ground plane and an Instantaneous Obstacle Map (IOM) is obtained. The IOM is transformed into a one dimensional steering vector that represents the hindrance associated with steering in a particular direction and then a one dimensional search is performed on the steering vector for an angle with least hindrance. The steering direction and hindrance value are used to set the speed of the vehicle. This system has been implemented on the Mobile Perception Lab (MPL) at University of Massachusetts at Amherst with considerable success, running at 2Hz for 256 240 sized images.