Stereo camera localization system for remotely operated robots

In nuclear power plants, a system to localize remotely operated robots conducting investigations is required. In this work, a method using a stereo camera is presented for a high accuracy robot localization system. The proposed method extracts the virtual characteristic points on the outer side of the camera images and reduces the number of calculations, which is proportional to localization accuracy. In a fundamental experiment, the proposed method detects the robot position with a 13.6 mm error range for a 240-mm movement, satisfying the target accuracy: less than the measurement error range of the conventional method (25.6 mm). (author)