Fast Localisation is a basic function within the mobile robotics. Beside the odometrie, mainly image sensors are used. This paper shows a short overview of the image sensors used for it. Outgoing from the 2D, 3D laser scanner, over 2D mono camera and 2D stereo camera, up to the omni-directional 2D camera are described problems, which appear in recording and modelling of the robot environment wi...

Accurate and highly reliable self-localization system is needed for a mobile robot to work in human daily life environment. The studies of a indoor autonomous mobile robot often use visual sensors and laser range finders. Unfortunately, it is difficult to estimate the exact global location if the environment has number of places that have similar shape boundaries or small number of landmarks to...

In recent years, the use of omni-directional cameras has become increasingly more popular in vision systems and robotics. To date, most of the research relating to omnidirectional cameras has focussed on the design of the camera or the way in which to project the omni-directional image to a panoramic view rather than on how to process these images after capture. Typically images obtained from o...

In this paper, we describe a visual servoing system developed as a human-robot interface to drive a mobile robot toward any chosen target. An omni-directional camera is used to get the 360 degree of field of view, and an efficient SSD based tracking technique is developed to track the target. The use of the omnidirectional geometry eliminates many of the problems common in visual tracking and m...

A lot of plumbings exist in factories and so on. Automated inspection of the plumbings by robots is desirable. Many of existing inspection robots have to rotate their cameras because conventional cameras can see only one direction while a plumbing has a cylindrical geometry. The use of an omnidirectional camera is effective for the solution of such problem. However, the shape measurement is dif...

In this paper we present an efficient multi-baseline stereo algorithm for panoramic image data. We derive a parameterization of epipolar curves in terms of inverse depth. As a result the search for image correspondences across multiple images can be performed efficiently. Furthermore, depth estimates are obtained directly thus bypassing the need to perform explicit stereoscopic triangulation. W...

Current and emerging mobile devices are omni directional in wireless communication. Such omni directionality not only limits device energy efficiency but also poses a significant challenge toward the capacity of wireless networks through inter-link interference. In this work, we seek to make mobile clients directional with beamsteering. We first demonstrate that beamsteering is already feasible...