- Info
Visual Navigation
This page describes the visual navigation work done under an 18-month EPSRC fast-track grant, which completed in March 2002
Visual navigation is a challenging application domain of Computer
Vision because the robot must infer three dimensional structure using two
dimensional images, and because the scene structure and lighting conditions
can vary greatly as the robot moves around its environment.
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Currently, we are developing a framework in which
we can integrate multiple diverse visual cues in order to guide a
mobile robot in an indoor environment.
The aim get the
ActivMedia Robotics Pioneer robot
shown on the right to automatically
move around the lab and explore its environment using an on-board camera as
its ``visual sense".
The robot sends the video signal from its Sony pan/tilt/zoom camera
via a unidirectional radio link to an off-board workstation
(SGI O2) which is networked to a powerful 32 processor 9 gigabyte memory
SGI origin 2000. These computers
processes the images and send speed and steering commands to the
robot via the wireless RS232 serial link. This arrangement is shown in the
diagram below.
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