Visual position recovery for an automated guided vehicle

The authors present a visual method which allows an automated guide vehicle to recover its absolute position anywhere on a guide path represented by a pseudorandom binary sequence whose terms are marked as distinct graphical symbols. An onboard image processing system recognizes these symbols and recovers the pseudorandom code identifying the position. An experimental vision system using a charge-coupled-device (CCD) camera mounted on a commercial HERO 2000 mobile robot has been implemented to validate the absolute position recovery technique. It uses an image acquisition board with 512*512 pixel resolution and a personal computer. The orientation of the guide path is determined by the use of binary symbols.<
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