A Single Camera Terrain Slope Estimation Technique for Natural Arctic Environments

• Published in: 2008 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
• Main Authors: Smith, Brian Stephen, Howard, Ayanna M.
• Other Authors: Georgia Institute of Technology. School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology. Center for Robotics and Intelligent Machines
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: English
• Published: Georgia Institute of Technology 2008
• Subjects: Autonomous navigation; Climate change; Fuzzy logic navigation schemes; Mobile robots; Mobile sensors; Natural arctic environments; Roll sensor; Single camera terrain slope estimation techniques; Arctic
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1853/38286; https://doi.org/10.1109/ROBOT.2008.4543624

©2008 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works. Presented at the 2008 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Pasadena, CA, USA, May 19-23, 2008. DOI:10.1109/ROBOT.2008.4543624 Arctic regions present one of the harshest environments on earth for people or mobile robots, yet many important scientific studies, particularly those involving climate change, require measurements from these areas. For the successful deployment of mobile sensors in the arctic, a reliable, fault tolerant, low-cost method of navigating must be developed. One aspect of an autonomous navigation system must be an assessment of the local terrain, including the slope of nearby regions. Presented here is a method of estimating the slope of the terrain in the robot's coordinate frame using only a single camera, which has been applied to both simulated arctic terrain and real images. The slope estimates are then converted into the global coordinate frame using information from a roll sensor, used as an input to a fuzzy logic navigation scheme, and tested in a simulated arctic environment.