Real-Time Simultaneous Localization and Mapping Using a Wide-Angle Stereo Camera

Abstract

This paper presents a new method for real-time ego-motion calculation applied to the location/orientation of a cheap wide-angle stereo camera in a 3D environment. To achieve that, the goal is to solve the simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) problem. Our approach consists in the 3D sequential mapping of natural landmarks by means of a stereo camera, which also provides means to obtain the camera location/orientation. The dynamic behavior is modeled using a top-down Bayesian method. The results show a comparison between our system and a monocular visual SLAM system using a hand-waved camera. Several improvements related to no priori environment knowledge requirements, lower processing time (real-time constrained) and higher robustness is presented