An approach to obstacle recognition for autonomous mobile robots

Dynamic vision may be utilized for detecting and classifying objects that could be obstacles for a mobile robot. Methods for accomplishing this are introduced. They have been implemented on a multiprocessor vision system and tested in outdoor environments. If conditions are fairly favorable obstacles are reliably recognized and false alarms (e.g. caused by shadows) are rejected. Among the main problems which have not yet been completely solved are the tracking of the road in a great distance, the recognition of the contours of an object when many features are visible on the object´s surface, and the separation of the object from the background