Title :
Non-metric navigation for mobile robot using optical flow
Author :
Yung Siang Liau ; Qun Zhang ; Yanan Li ; Shuzhi Sam Ge
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., Nat. Univ. of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore
Abstract :
In this paper, we address the problem of non-metric navigation for mobile robot in indoor environment. With pure vision sensors, we tackle the most fundamental problem in autonomous mobile robot navigation - to achieve obstacle avoidance ability in mobile robot. We approach the problem by extracting time-to-contact information using optical flow and motion analysis. Our method is based on flow divergence which contains qualitative depth information of the environment. In addition, we presented a flexible robot heading decision making framework that is able to incorporate higher level navigation task on top of obstacle avoiding behaviour. A state-machine based control scheme is utilized for the coordination of the robot´s action defined under a behaviour based design. Through virtual simulation and physical experiments, we demonstrated the effectiveness of our non-metric navigation strategy in unknown environment.
Keywords :
collision avoidance; decision making; finite state machines; image motion analysis; image sequences; indoor environment; mobile robots; navigation; robot vision; autonomous mobile robot navigation; behaviour based design; environment qualitative depth information; flexible robot heading decision making framework; flow divergence; indoor environment; motion analysis; nonmetric navigation; obstacle avoidance ability; optical flow; physical experiment; robot action coordination; state-machine based control scheme; time-to-contact information extraction; unknown environment; virtual simulation; vision sensor; Collision avoidance; Mobile robots; Navigation; Optical imaging; Optical sensors; Visualization; Non-metric navigation; autonomous mobile robots; optical flow;
Conference_Titel :
Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2012 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on
Conference_Location :
Vilamoura
Print_ISBN :
978-1-4673-1737-5
DOI :
10.1109/IROS.2012.6386221