Cooperative navigation using the optical flow and time-to-contact techniques

In order to have an operative system with multiple robots each one with its own configuration, it is important to establish cooperative mechanisms that allow the robots with less sensory power to get helped from the robots with more sensory power. In this context, it is important that the cooperation is done in a way that allows each robot to take advantage of the particular resources of the other robots in the system. This paper presents an application where a group of robots must cooperate in order to safely navigate through an unknown environment. In this application, only one robot has a camera mounted on it and none of the other robots have any type of sensor. The robot with the camera calculates the optical flow values from the images that it gets from the camera, and from these values calculates the ldquotime to contactrdquo values that determine the time that the robot has before colliding with an obstacle in front of it. This information is shared among the team so that any robot can navigate without colliding with the obstacles.