A visually guided mobile robot acting in indoor environments

The paper describes the practical implementation of a vision-based navigation system for a mobile robot operating in indoor environments. The robot acquires visual information by means of three CCD cameras mounted on board. A stereo pair is used for ground plane obstacle detection and avoidance, while the third camera is used to locate landmarks and compute the robot´s position. Odometric readings are used to guide visual perception by simple `where to look next´ strategies. The whole processing and the control architecture determining the overall behaviour of the robot are mainly implemented on a parallel MIMD machine. Some examples are presented, showing how the robot moves in a partially structured environment reaching the specified goal points with a fair degree of accuracy, avoiding unpredicted obstacles and following trajectories obtained through the cooperation of the various navigation modules running in parallel