Design and calibration of a specialized polydioptric camera rig

Abstract

The development of advanced computational machines does not necessarily provide solutions to all the scientific problems in the research. It has been observed in the nature that all creatures have evolved highly exclusive sensory organs depending on their habitat and the form of availability of the resources they utilize for their survival. In this project, a novel omnidirectional camera rig is proposed that is exclusively designed to operate for highly specified operations and tasks in the field of mobile robots. Navigation problems on uneven terrains and detection of the moving objects while the robot is itself in motion are the core problems that omnidirectional systems tackle. The proposed omnidirectional system is a compact and a rigid vision system with dioptric cameras that provide a 360° field-of-view in horizontal and vertical, with no blind spot in their site plus a high resolution stereo camera is mounted to monitor anterior field-of-view for precise results with depth information of the scene. Structure from motion algorithm is adapted and implemented to prove the validity of the design of the proposed camera rig and a toolbox is developed to calibrate similar systems.