3-D Range Measurement by Distributed Spatial-Filters

Abstract

In today's industrial robots, especially in the filed of unmanned carriers, visual information is indispensable. For the purpose of avoiding obstacles, recognition of the direction is more important than recognition of the minute shape of the obstacles.
In this paper we propose an optical 3-D range sensor for a moving robot, an unmanned carrier, etc. This is based on a spatial-filtering used for detecting a focus. In this system many spatial-filters are arranged at equal interval in an image plane so that azimuth's information could be detected as well as the distance. We take the accuracy of approximately ±3cm for the obstacle at distance of 60cm in the experiments.