• Advances in robotics research
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• v.1 no.2
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• pp.127-140
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• 2014

This work presents an IR-based system for parking assistance and obstacle detection in the automotive field that employs the Microsoft Kinect camera for fast 3D point cloud reconstruction. In contrast to previous research that attempts to explicitly identify obstacles, the proposed system aims to detect "reachable regions" of the environment, i.e., those regions where the vehicle can drive to from its current position. A user-friendly 2D traversability grid of cells is generated and used as a visual aid for parking assistance. Given a raw 3D point cloud, first each point is mapped into individual cells, then, the elevation information is used within a graph-based algorithm to label a given cell as traversable or non-traversable. Following this rationale, positive and negative obstacles, as well as unknown regions can be implicitly detected. Additionally, no flat-world assumption is required. Experimental results, obtained from the system in typical parking scenarios, are presented showing its effectiveness for scene interpretation and detection of several types of obstacle.