Panorama creation using a team of robots

Abstract

A system is presented which allows a single human to teleoperate a team of camera-equipped robots. This paper emphasizes the image processing required to take a number of views and construct a single panorama which provides a sense of a 3-D environment to the operator who finds it easy to comprehend the environment and to control the team using something as simple as a joystick. Since the cameras have diverse poses, their output images must be distorted to provide smooth alignment. This is accomplished by correspondence finding, triangular tessellation and warping of a portion of each view. The panorama which gives a 180° field-of-view is projected onto a semi-circular array of monitors to provide the operator with a sensation of both forward and peripheral views.