Heading direction computation of golf-ball collecting robot using vanishing points

Heading direction of robots is proposed using vanishing points of parallel lines contained in the facility buildings. In robot navigation, the straight navigation is often needed, which requires computation of the heading angle of the robot. In this study, we found that the relative heading direction of the robot to the surrounding facility buildings can be computed using the vanishing points of parallel lines of the buildings. The inter-stair parallel lines of facility buildings are extracted and the vanishing points are computed. As the vanishing points are computed in far away, the heading direction of the robot is close to normal angle to the facility building. The proposed vanishing point method is a novel robot orientation computing method and is proved to be time efficient and accurate via experiments. The experimental results of the proposed method are included in this paper.