VISOCAR: an autonomous industrial transport vehicle guided by visual navigation

The authors describe a vision system, called VISOCAR, for mobile robot guidance in industrial environments. VISOCAR is an optically navigating AGV (automatically guided vehicle) that, owing to its local intelligence, can travel automatically in its natural environment, does not need any dedicated floor installations, and does not impose any restrictions on the route network or factory environment. It can navigate accurately on its track and integrate multisensor information to enhance functional redundancy and system reliability. It is shown that the navigation task can be broken down into a hierarchy of goals, which can be attained by functionally independent modules. The system architecture presented reflects this fact: there is a hierarchy of navigation capabilities, rather than a hierarchy of image processing steps. The successful implementation of this concept for autonomous navigation of AGVs in environments that are well structured but not artificially reduced in visual complexity shows that this modular system architecture is well suited to the specific demands of the application in spite of very limited computational resources