Scene reconstruction and robot navigation using dynamic fields

In this paper, we present an approach to autonomous robot navigation in an unknown environment. We design and integrate algorithms to reconstruct the scene, locate obstacles and do short-term field-based path planning. The sc ene reconstruction is done using a region matching flow algorithm to recove r image deformation and structure from motion to recover depth. Obstacles a re located by comparing the surface normal of the known floor with the surf ace normal of the scene. Our path planning method is based on electric-like fields and uses current densities that can guarantee fields without local minima and maxima which can provide solutions without the need of heuristic s that plague the more traditional potential fields approaches. We implemen ted a modular distributed software platform (FBN) to test this approach and we ran several experiments to verify the performance with very encouraging results.