Visual navigation of an autonomous robot using white line recognition

This paper proposes a navigation system for an autonomous mobile robot that is designed to participate in the annual international robot competition, ABU (Asian Broadcast Union) Robocon 2002. The self-localization of the robot is done by detecting the position and orientation of vertically intersecting white guide lines laid on the game field, with a USB camera pointing to the ground perpendicularly. Given the information of the playground, the robot can decide where to go autonomously by calculating its position and comparing it with the predetermined routine coordinate in the map. With the visual navigation system the vehicle can follow the line promptly and stop at any given intersection precisely.