Geoffrey Daniels
Supervised by: David Bull, Walterio Mayol-Cuevas, J Burn
Using state of the art computer vision techniques and insights into the biological process used by animals to traverse any terrain a system has been created to enable a robotic platform to gather the information required to move safely throughout an unknown environment. A goal of this project is to produce a system that can run in real-time upon an arbitrary locomotion platform and provide local route planning and hazard detection. With the real-time aim in mind the core parts of the current algorithm have been developed using NVidia’s CUDA language for general purpose computing on GPUs as the code is embarrassingly parallel and GPUs can provide a huge speed increase for parallel processes. Currently without significant optimisation the system is able to compute the 3D surface ahead of the camera in approximately 100ms.
This system will be a module of a larger grant to develop a bio-inspired concept system for overall terrestrial perception and safe locomotion.
Interesting Results
Some example footage of the system generating a virtual 3D world from a single camera in real time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h36hVOerMFU&list=PLJmQZRbc9yWWrg6A0R_NFYHl6WP4FoNe9#t=15