Visual navigation around curved obstacles

Author

Blake, A. ; Brady, M. ; Cipolla, R. ; Xie, Z. ; Zisserman, A.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Eng. Sci., Oxford Univ., UK

fYear

1991

fDate

9-11 Apr 1991

Firstpage

2490

Abstract

An approach to path-planning around smooth obstacles that exploits visually derived geometry is proposed. A moving robot can scan the silhouette or apparent contour of an obstacle and estimate a minimum length path. This is done by seeking geodesics which can be extrapolated smoothly, around the obstacle and towards the goal. Preliminary implementation of this idea uses a real-time visual contour tracker running at 16 Hz, with a camera mounted on an Adept robot arm. The camera first dithers to generate visual motion, a safe path is estimated, and the robot steers the camera around the obstacle with a clearance of a few millimeters

Keywords

computer vision; computerised navigation; computerised pattern recognition; mobile robots; planning (artificial intelligence); real-time systems; Adept; apparent contour; computer vision; geodesics seeking; mobile robots; obstacles avoidance; path-planning; real-time; silhouette; visual contour tracker; visual navigation; Cameras; Computational geometry; Image analysis; Image motion analysis; Infrared sensors; Motion analysis; Motion estimation; Navigation; Path planning; Robot vision systems;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Robotics and Automation, 1991. Proceedings., 1991 IEEE International Conference on

Conference_Location

Sacramento, CA

Print_ISBN

0-8186-2163-X

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ROBOT.1991.131999

Filename

131999