Development and integration of generic components for a teachable vision-based mobile robot

This paper presents a mobile robotic system for human assistance in navigation-the robot navigates by receiving visual instructions from a human being and is able to replicate them autonomously. We describe three generic components defined as the HOST, the VISION, and the CONTROL components as well as their integration in our teachable mobile robot. These components are connected to each other via a transputer serial link, namely they are loosely coupled, they work in parallel and are asynchronous with each other. Each component is described with a peculiar feature of extensibility. Especially in the VISION component, there are two major features. The first one is a correlator which each vision board possesses. The correlator does block-matching between the template and the grabbed images in real-time. The other is the PIM library which manages the visual tasks over limited parallel visual resources of the mobile robot. These features of our design enable the system to be real-time and allow for efficient and extensible software development. In order to show the feasibility of our system design, we present a preliminary experiment of the route teaching on our mobile robot.

[1]  E. D. Dickmanns,et al.  4 D-dynamic scene analysis with integral spatio-temporal models , 1988 .

[2]  Hiroshi Ishiguro,et al.  T-Net for navigating a vision-guided robot in a real world , 1995, Proceedings of 1995 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[3]  Ian Horswill,et al.  Polly: A Vision-Based Artificial Agent , 1993, AAAI.

[4]  Charles E. Thorpe,et al.  Vision and Navigation , 1990 .

[5]  Masayuki Inaba,et al.  Robot vision system with a correlation chip for real-time tracking, optical flow and depth map generation , 1992, Proceedings 1992 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[6]  Takashi Tsubouchi,et al.  Map assisted vision system of mobile robots for reckoning in a building environment , 1987, Proceedings. 1987 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[7]  Martial Hebert,et al.  Vision and navigation for the Carnegie-Mellon Navlab , 1988 .

[8]  Dean A. Pomerleau,et al.  Combining artificial neural networks and symbolic processing for autonomous robot guidance , 1991 .

[9]  Hirochika Inoue,et al.  Hyper Scooter: a mobile robot sharing visual information with a human , 1995, Proceedings of 1995 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.