Navigation of a mobile robot on the temporal development of the optic flow

The robot navigation task presented in this paper is to drive through the center of a corridor, based on a sequence of images from an on-board camera. Our measurements of the system state the distance to the wall and orientation of the wall, are derived from the optic flow. Whereas the structure of the environment is usually computed from the spatial derivatives of the optic flow, we used the structure contained in the temporal derivatives of the optic flow to compare the environment structure and hence the system state. The algorithm is used to control a 'remote brain' robot and results on the accuracy of the state estimates are presented.