On the Use of Optical Flow in Robot Navigation

This work addresses the use of optical flow to supervise the navigation of mobile robot. The optical flow information is computed from the images sequence in order to be used in the navigation algorithm. The optical flow provides very important information about the robot environment, like: the obstacles disposition, the robot heading, the time to collision and the depth. The use of this information in autonomous robot navigation consists in balancing the amount of left and right side flow, this technique allows robot navigation without any collision with obstacles. The robustness of the developed algorithm will be showed by some examples.