Obstacle avoidance on a mobile inverted pendulum robot

Optical flow and monocular vision have been used as a means of providing obstacle avoidance to a telerobotics platform. The robotic platform, controlled to avoid obstacles through an unstructured indoor environment, is of a small two wheeled coaxial robot (inverted pendulum). Suitable digital filtering techniques are developed to remove the effect of the robot´s inherent self-stabilizing motion and other effects that corrupt the sensitive optical flow information. The proposed obstacle avoidance method worked well in real-time with some constraints such as slow turning motions and requiring sufficient track-able features in the image.