Obstacle detection of a biped robot

  Detection of obstacles is important for a mobile robot that moves in a living space, especially for a biped robot that falls down even with a small obstacle. We make a compact range image sensor for detecting small obstacles on a plane. The sensor consists of a laser projector and a CCD camera, and measures a relative disparity map (RDMap) whose measurement errors are not affected by the distance. From the obtained RDMap, a plane is estimated and regions out of the plane are detected as obstacles. The system is suitable for detecting thin obstacles. And by using a multi-slit laser projector, the sensor can detect obstacles with small area.
-Conference papers-

Takahiro Kuroki, Kenji Terabayashi, Kazunori Umeda,“Construction of a compact range image sensor using multi-slit laser projector and obstacle detection of a humanoid with the sensor”, Proc. 2010 Int. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems, pp. 5972-5977, 2010