Intelligent vision-sensor for robot-sensing applications

The use of vision-based sensors for applications in various fields ranging from robot navigation to visual inspection in industrial environments has largely increased during the last decades. The contribution of this paper is in the design and the realisation of the prototype of an intelligent vision sensor to be used for robot-sensing and industrial applications. The proposed sensor is based on a 1 MPixel CMOS sensor and includes a digital signal processor that directly performs low level image processing algorithms thus eliminating the need of high-bandwidth communication channels between the sensor and the host PC. The design targets at high frame-rates, low power-consumption, and small size of the final sensor. We provide experimental results of two application scenarios using the proposed sensor