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Real-time obstacle detection using range images: processing dynamically-sized sliding windows on a GPU

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2015

Caio César Teodoro Mendes ,
Fernando Santos Osório  and
Denis Fernando Wolf
Caio César Teodoro Mendes*
Affiliation:
Mobile Robotics Laboratory, University of São Paulo (USP), Av. Trabalhador São-Carlense, 400, P.O. Box 668, 13.560-970 São Carlos, Brazil. E-mails: fosorio@icmc.usp.br, denis@icmc.usp.br
Fernando Santos Osório
Affiliation:
Mobile Robotics Laboratory, University of São Paulo (USP), Av. Trabalhador São-Carlense, 400, P.O. Box 668, 13.560-970 São Carlos, Brazil. E-mails: fosorio@icmc.usp.br, denis@icmc.usp.br
Denis Fernando Wolf
Affiliation:
Mobile Robotics Laboratory, University of São Paulo (USP), Av. Trabalhador São-Carlense, 400, P.O. Box 668, 13.560-970 São Carlos, Brazil. E-mails: fosorio@icmc.usp.br, denis@icmc.usp.br
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: caiom@icmc.usp.br
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Summary

An efficient obstacle detection technique is required so that navigating robots can avoid obstacles and potential hazards. This task is usually simplified by relying on structural patterns. However, obstacle detection constitutes a challenging problem in unstructured unknown environments, where such patterns may not exist. Talukder et al. (2002, IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium, pp. 610–618.) successfully derived a method to deal with such environments. Nevertheless, the method has a high computational cost and researchers that employ it usually rely on approximations to achieve real-time. We hypothesize that by using a graphics processing unit (GPU), the computing time of the method can be significantly reduced. Throughout the implementation process, we developed a general framework for processing dynamically-sized sliding windows on a GPU. The framework can be applied to other problems that require similar computation. Experiments were performed with a stereo camera and an RGB-D sensor, where the GPU implementations were compared to multi-core and single-core CPU implementations. The results show a significant gain in the computational performance, i.e. in a particular instance, a GPU implementation is almost 90 times faster than a single-core one.

Keywords

Obstacle detectionAutonomous navigationStereo visionGraphics processing unit (GPU)
Type
Articles
Information
Robotica , Volume 35 , Issue 1 , January 2017 , pp. 85 - 100
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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