Vision for Mobile Robot Navigation

Vision is a very important sense for humans. Robots also need to be aware of their environment for working in it. This is even more important for mobile robots that operate in unknown environments that are not prepared for robots. In this paper, we focus on the aspect of navigation of mobile robots for applications in search and rescue as well as planetary exploration. We discuss a typical vision pipeline and navigation stack that has been developed at the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics of the German Aerospace Center (DLR). In recent years, we have successfully applied the solution to a number of crawling, driving and flying robots. We present mobile systems in several applications and also discuss the relation between computer vision and photogrammetry.