Using reference objects to improve vision-based bearing measurements

— Robots perceiving its environment using cameras usually need a good representation of how the camera is aligned to the body and how the camera is rotated relative to the ground. This is especially important for bearing-based distance measurement. In this paper we show how to use reference objects to improve vision-based distance measurements to objects of unknown size. Several methods for different kinds of reference objects are introduced. These are objects of known size (like a ball), objects extending over the horizon (like goals and beacons), and objects with known shape on the ground (like field lines). We give a detailed description how to determine the rotation of the robot’s camera relative to the ground, provide an error-estimation for all methods and describe the experiments we performed on an Aibo robot.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: IROS
• Authors: Heinrich Mellmann, Matthias Jüngel, Michael Spranger
• Keywords: Camera, Distance Measurements, IROS 2008, Reference Objects, Robotics