Image processing transputer-based machine for mobile robot road-following

Reports recent work on the mobile robot project underway at the University of Bristol. The aim of the project is to explore mobile robot road-following algorithms and suitable hardware architectures to run these algorithms. The prototype hardware, designed and built at the University, is a real-time frame grabber system based on transputers. The system is capable of concurrently grabbing, processing and displaying 256×256 8-bit pixel images from a camera or video recorder. The authors describe algorithms which have been implemented on the transputer network to achieve near real-time execution on sequences of video data