Moving obstacle avoidance of a mobile robot using a single camera

This paper presents some preliminary results of the detection of moving obstacles (particularly walking humans) by the use of a single camera attached to a mobile robot. When a camera moves, simple moving object detection techniques for a stationary camera, such as background subtraction or image differencing, cannot be employed. We thus detect objects that move near the robot by block-based motion estimation. In the method, an image is firstly divided into small blocks, and then the motion of each block is searched by comparing two consecutive images. If the motion between matching blocks is significantly large, the block in the current image is classified as belonging to moving objects. The method is verified by the indoor navigation experiments of a robot.

[1]  Larry H. Matthies,et al.  Kalman filter-based algorithms for estimating depth from image sequences , 1989, International Journal of Computer Vision.

[2]  Massimo Piccardi,et al.  Background subtraction techniques: a review , 2004, 2004 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics (IEEE Cat. No.04CH37583).

[3]  Illah R. Nourbakhsh,et al.  Appearance-Based Obstacle Detection with Monocular Color Vision , 2000, AAAI/IAAI.

[4]  Javier Civera,et al.  Inverse Depth Parametrization for Monocular SLAM , 2008, IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

[5]  Hobart R. Everett,et al.  Sensors for Mobile Robots , 1995 .

[6]  Fulvio Mastrogiovanni,et al.  The ANSER project: Airport nonstop surveillance expert robot , 2007, 2007 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[7]  Stefan May,et al.  3D time-of-flight cameras for mobile robotics , 2006, 2006 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[8]  Se-Young Oh,et al.  Navigation strategy for the service robot in the elevator environment , 2007, 2007 International Conference on Control, Automation and Systems.

[9]  Pradip Sheth,et al.  Characterization of Infrared Range-Finder PBS-03JN for 2-D Mapping , 2005, Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[10]  Heiko Hirschmüller,et al.  Stereo camera based navigation of mobile robots on rough terrain , 2009, 2009 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[11]  T. D. Williams,et al.  Depth from camera motion in a real world scene , 1980, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

[12]  Kurt Konolige,et al.  Small Vision Systems: Hardware and Implementation , 1998 .

[13]  Sungbok Kim,et al.  Optimally overlapped ultrasonic sensor ring design for minimal positional uncertainty in obstacle detection , 2010, ICCAS 2010.

[14]  Marcelo Schiavon Porto,et al.  Two Novel Algorithms for High Quality Motion Estimation in High Definition Video Sequences , 2011, 2011 24th SIBGRAPI Conference on Graphics, Patterns and Images.

[15]  Cang Ye,et al.  Characterization of a 2D laser scanner for mobile robot obstacle negotiation , 2002, Proceedings 2002 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.02CH37292).