An optical flow-based sensing system for reactive mobile robot navigation

• Published in: Controle & automação : revista da Sociedade Brasileira de Automática 2007-09, Vol.18 (3), p.265-277
• Main Authors: Caldeira, Eliete Maria de Oliveira, Schneebeli, Hans Jörg Andreas, Sarcinelli-Filho, Mário
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: AUTOMATION & CONTROL SYSTEMS
• ISSN: 0103-1759; 0103-1759
• DOI: 10.1590/S0103-17592007000300001

This work discusses the use of optical flow to generate the sensorial information a mobile robot needs to react to the presence of obstacles when navigating in a non-structured environment. A sensing system based on optical flow and time-to-collision calculation is here proposed and experimented, which accomplishes two important paradigms. The first one is that all computations are performed onboard the robot, in spite of the limited computational capability available. The second one is that the algorithms for optical flow and time-to-collision calculations are fast enough to give the mobile robot the capability of reacting to any environmental change in real-time. Results of real experiments in which the sensing system here proposed is used as the only source of sensorial data to guide a mobile robot to avoid obstacles while wandering around are presented, and the analysis of such results allows validating the proposed sensing system.