A Study on Stereo Vision-based Local Map Building and Path Generation for Obstacle Avoidance of the Hexapod Robot

This paper is concerned with stereo vision-based approach to detect obstacles and to generate the path of destination from the start. The hexapod robot in the experiment is cable of walking by legs and driving by wheels simultaneously. The hexapod robot operates under the driving mode normally, and it changes driving mode to walking mode to overcome obstacles using its legs. Disparity map, which is the correlation between two images taken by stereo camera, is employed for calculation of the distance between the robot and obstacles. When the obstacles information is extracted from the disparity map, the potential field algorithm is applied to create the obstacle-avoidance path. Simulator, based on OpenGL, is developed to generate the graphical path, and the experimental results are shown for the verification of the proposed algorithm.