Integration and use of a 3-D vision system in telerobotics
Giovanni B. Garibotto · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1992
The paper describes a 3-D real-time computer vision system which is used as a support to telerobotics applications in hostile and partially unstructured environments. The human operator is always supposed to supervise and control the movement and operation of the robot, from a remote site, using appropriate sensing facilities (force reaction, vision, etc.). The main task considered here is an effective use of 3D vision information for the operator in terms of response time, quality, and quantity of the displayed information. The proposed modular hardware architecture has been designed and realized in order to accomplish the most severe tasks of image preprocessing, feature extraction, and 3D stereo matching of segment features in the scene. It represents a powerful 3D front-end processor able to provide an adequate computational power also for the following intermediate- and high-level processing stages.