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Robust ground plane region detection using multiple visual cues for obstacle avoidance of a mobile robot

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 March 2014

Chia-How Lin  and
Kai-Tai Song
Chia-How Lin
Affiliation:
Institute of Electrical Control Engineering, National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan, Republic of China
Kai-Tai Song*
Affiliation:
Institute of Electrical Control Engineering, National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan, Republic of China
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: ktsong@mail.nctu.edu.tw
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Summary

This paper presents a vision-based obstacle avoidance design using a monocular camera onboard a mobile robot. A novel image processing procedure is developed to estimate the distance between the robot and obstacles based-on inverse perspective transformation (IPT) in an image plane. A robust image processing solution is proposed to detect and segment a drivable ground area within the camera view. The proposed method integrates robust feature matching with adaptive color segmentation for plane estimation and tracking to cope with variations in illumination and camera view. After IPT and ground region segmentation, distance measurement results are obtained similar to those of a laser range finder for mobile robot obstacle avoidance and navigation. The merit of this algorithm is that the mobile robot can have the capacity of path finding and obstacle avoidance by using a single monocular camera. Practical experimental results on a wheeled mobile robot show that the proposed imaging system successfully obtains distances of surrounding objects for reactive navigation in an indoor environment.

Keywords

Computer visionNavigationMobile robotsControl of robotic systemsService robots
Type
Articles
Information
Robotica , Volume 33 , Issue 2 , February 2015 , pp. 436 - 450
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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