Autonomous Robot Navigation Using Vanishing Points
Posted on January 19th, 2009 in Hobbyist
Shown below is a video of a robot that uses the perceived vanishing point of an image to navigate through a corridor. The robot, based on an iRobot Create, uses a standard webcam and video processing to locate the vanishing point of what it sees, and navigates towards that point. Such navigation works very well in office-like environments with straight walls, windows, and ceilings. The robot also uses visual clues, like orange traffic cones, to recognize specific locations.
Such navigation has some very interesting implications for simple navigation through common environments (houses, offices, shopping malls, etc.). Has anyone tried this using RoboRealm? You can read the project report (PDF) here.
[Via Hackzine]
I was responsible for vision-based navigation of the robot within the hallways. I used the vanishing points from the parallel lines present indoors to compute the robot heading. This was then fed into a controller to control the direction of the robot for navigation. The computation was made robust to change in light conditions, false detections, occlusions by a layered filtering approach that included RANSAC and least squares filtering among others.
Such navigation has some very interesting implications for simple navigation through common environments (houses, offices, shopping malls, etc.). Has anyone tried this using RoboRealm? You can read the project report (PDF) here.
[Via Hackzine]
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January 21st, 2009 at 04:54
I tried doing this a couple of years ago, and it does work but only in corridor type situations. Notice in this case that the black stripe at door handle height is providing a strong cue.
It turns out that there are plenty of situations in a home or office environment where vanishing points cannot be easily computed.
January 27th, 2009 at 00:05
Bob,
Thanks for the input. You don’t happen to have any pictures or video of your robot, do you? I’d love to see some.
I can definitely see the limitations of this implementation, but coupled with other means of navigation, it might be useful. I can also see how it can be used in specific situations – perhaps hospitals?