NightMare: a simple and efficient vision-based robot

This paper presents the architecture and algorithms developed for NightMare, a vision-based robot built by the authors for the participation in the 2005 edition of the Micro-Rato contest. This robot has won the special prize for innovation, awarded by the jury, due to the use of vision and a computer running Linux. The architecture of NightMare integrates vision information with a robust navigation algorithm and an odometry system maintaining a relative simple hardware and a small size