A trinocular vision system for a mobile robot

Nowadays, autonomous vehicles are undergoing a distinct evolution, taking advantage of the recent technological progress in computer architectures. The development tools are more sophisticated, forwarding the trend to dedicated architectures. In the paper, the authors consider a parallel vision sub-system integrated in an overall architecture for a mobile robot (indoor autonomous vehicle). The system modules work in parallel, communicating through a hierarchical blackboard, an extension of the `tuple space´ from LINDA concepts, where they may exchange data or synchronization messages. The processing elements are of different skills, built around 50 MHz i860-XP Intel RISC processors for high level processing, and pipelined systolic array processors based on PLAs or FPGAs for low level image processing