Omnidirectional stereo camera for harsh radiation environments

We have been developing a stereo camera whose field of view is 360 degrees consisting of three hyperbolic mirrors and a single camera, which makes this camera compact and inexpensive. The hyperbolic mirrors enable the omnidirectional view and combining three of them makes it possible to obtain images from two different view points, which are used to measure distances based on the stereo-vision principle. By adopting a radiation tolerant camera (250 kilo pixels) as the single camera, this stereo camera becomes a sensing device suitable for robot operation in harsh radiation environments. The prototype is ~360 millimeters tall and the distance error less than 5%. In this talk, we present the optical system and the prototype of the omnidirectional stereo camera as well as procedures to obtain the image and distance information.