Visual control signals for road following

A new quantitative, vision-based approach to road following is presented. Road following is considered as a control, rather than a vision, problem. The approach is based on the theoretical framework of the recently developed optical flow-based visual field theory. By building on the theory, it is suggested that motion commands can be generated directly from a visual feature, or cue, consisting of the projection into the image of the tangent point on the edge of the road, along with the optical flow of this point. Using this cue, several different vision-based control approaches are possible