A Smart vision system for advanced LGV navigation and obstacle detection

This article presents the VisLab solution for obstacle detection and navigation support for unmanned vehicles in industrial environments. Although the literature contains many examples to tackle this problem, this solution can be considered innovative as it improves traditional laser-based systems. The proposed system is composed by two sub-systems. The first one is an obstacle detection system, which also allows the detection of hanging obstacles, within a 3D monitored area. This solution outperforms the original laser scanner based system used for safety which was limited to bi-dimensional areas only. Another vision system is used for tracking a guideline on the ground, that solves problems of localizations and drifts that sometimes can happen using the laser and vehicle odometry only. After a long testing phase, the system is actually installed in a modern industrial warehouse in Parma in order to finally estimate its robustness and reliability.