A visually guided mobile robot acting in indoor environments

The paper describes the practical implementation of a vision-based navigation system for a mobile robot operating in indoor environments. The robot acquires visual information by means of three CCD cameras mounted on board. A stereo pair is used for ground plane obstacle detection and avoidance, while the third camera is used to locate landmarks and compute the robot's position. Odometric readings are used to guide visual perception by simple 'where to look next' strategies. The whole processing and the control architecture determining the overall behaviour of the robot are mainly implemented on a parallel MIMD machine. Some examples are presented, showing how the robot moves in a partially structured environment reaching the specified goal points with a fair degree of accuracy, avoiding unpredicted obstacles and following trajectories obtained through the cooperation of the various navigation modules running in parallel.<
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