Visualization of obstacles on bird's-eye view by omnidirectional 3D ranging using LiDAR for remote controlled robot

Bird's-eye view system is one of image presentation systems for teleoperation. Bird's-eye view image helps an operator to visually recognize surrounding environments because of its high visibility. However, when there are obstacles that are higher than the door or the ground, there is a problem that their positional appearance is incorrectly shown on bird's-eye view image because of the image distortion. This paper presents a new method to visualize correctly obstacles' positional appearance on the bird's-eye view image by omnidirectional 3D ranging. Specifically, the information of the distance to obstacles measured by LiDAR is superimposed onto the floor or the ground as points with colors obtained by fish-eye cameras. As shown in the experimental results, the image generated by this proposed method can improve the safety and visibility in teleoperation.