Intelligent Stereo Vision in Autonomous Robot Traversability Estimation

Abstract

Traversability estimation is the process of assessing whether a robot is able to move across a specific area. Autonomous robots need to have such an ability to automatically detect and avoid non-traversable areas and, thus, stereo vision is commonly used towards this end constituting a reliable solution under a variety of circumstances. This chapter discusses two different intelligent approaches to assess the traversability of the terrain in front of a stereo vision-equipped robot. First, an approach based on a fuzzy inference system is examined and then another approach is considered, which extracts geometrical descriptions of the scene depth distribution and uses a trained support vector machine (SVM) to assess the traversability. The two methods are presented and discussed in detail.