Högskolan i Skövde

In this paper we present a stereo visual odometry system for mobile robots that is not sensitive to uneven terrain. Two cameras is mounted perpendicular to the ground and height and traveled distance are calculated using normalized cross correlation. A method for evaluating the system is developed, where flower boxes containing representative surfaces are placed in a metal-working lathe. The cameras are mounted on the carriage which can be positioned manually with 0.1 mm accuracy. Images are captured every 10 mm over 700 mm. The tests are performed on eight different surfaces representing real world situations. The resulting error is less than 0.6% of traveled distance on surfaces where the maximum height variation is measured to 96 mm. The variance is measured for eight test runs, total 5.6 m, to 0.040 mm. This accuracy is sufficient for crop-scale agricultural operations.

In this paper we have developed a mobile robot which is able to perform crop-scale operations using vision as only sensor. The system consists of a row-following system and a visual odometry system. The row following system captures images from a front looking camera on the robot and the crop rows are extracted using Hough transform. Both distance to the rows and heading angle is provided which both are used to control the steering. The visual odometry system uses two cameras in a stereo setup pointing perpendicular to the ground. This system measures the travelled distance by measuring the ground movement and compensate for height variation. Experiments are performed on an artificial field due to the season. The result shows that the visual odometry have accuracy better than 2.1% of travelled distance.

This paper describes a method of detecting parallel  rows  on  an  agricultural  field  using  an  omnidirectional camera.  The  method  works  both  on  cameras  with  a  fisheye lens and cameras with a catadioptric lens. A combination of an edge based method and a Hough transform method is suggested to find the rows. The vanishing point of several parallel rows is estimated using a second Hough transform. The method is evaluated on synthetic images generated with calibration data from real lenses. Scenes with several rows are produced, where each  plant  is  positioned  with  a  specified  error.  Experiments are  performed  on  these  synthetic  images  and  on  real  field images. The result shows that good accuracy is obtained on the vanishing point once it is detected correctly. Further it shows that the edge based method works best when the rows consists of solid lines, and the Hough method works best when the rows consists  of  individual  plants.  The  experiments  also  show  that the combined method provides better detection than using the methods separately.