Visual navigation around curved obstacles

Abstract

An approach to path-planning around smooth obstacles that exploits visually derived geometry is proposed. A moving robot can scan the silhouette or apparent contour of an obstacle and estimate a minimum length path. This is done by seeking geodesics which can be extrapolated smoothly, around the obstacle and towards the goal. Preliminary implementation of this idea uses a real-time visual contour tracker running at 16 Hz, with a camera mounted on an Adept robot arm. The camera first dithers to generate visual motion, a safe path is estimated, and the robot steers the camera around the obstacle with a clearance of a few millimeters.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>