A practical obstacle detection and avoidance system

Author

Badal, Sumit ; Ravela, Srinivas ; Draper, Bruce ; Hanson, Allen

Author_Institution

Comput. Vision Res. Lab., Massachusetts Univ., Amherst, MA, USA

fYear

1994

fDate

5-7 Dec 1994

Firstpage

97

Lastpage

104

Abstract

A practical real-time system for passive obstacle detection and avoidance is presented. Range information is obtained from stereo images by first computing a disparity picture from the image pair and extracting points above the ground plane. Then these points are projected onto the ground plane and an Instantaneous Obstacle Map (IOM) is obtained. The IOM is transformed into a one dimensional steering vector that represents the hindrance associated with steering in a particular direction and then a one dimensional search is performed on the steering vector for an angle with least hindrance. The steering direction and hindrance value are used to set the speed of the vehicle. This system has been implemented on the Mobile Perception Lab (MPL) at University of Massachusetts at Amherst with considerable success, running at 2 Hz for 256×240 sized images

Keywords

mobile robots; path planning; real-time systems; stereo image processing; Instantaneous Obstacle Map; Mobile Perception Lab; disparity picture; obstacle avoidance; obstacle detection; one dimensional steering vector; real-time system; stereo images; Computer vision; Detection algorithms; Laboratories; Laser radar; Mobile agents; Mobile computing; Real time systems; Sonar; Stereo vision; Vehicles;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Applications of Computer Vision, 1994., Proceedings of the Second IEEE Workshop on

Conference_Location

Sarasota, FL

Print_ISBN

0-8186-6410-X

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ACV.1994.341294

Filename

341294