Road Edge Tracking for Robot Road Following

Abstract

The problem of navigating a robot along a road is ap-proached by means of creating and updating a simple representation of the road from a sequence of images. The representation chosen is a 4-parameter model that describes the width, direction and simple curvature of the road in a vehicle centred (X,Y,Z) world coordinate system. The model is created from tracking along ma-jor edge features in an image and applying constraints to select road edge candidates. Updating consists of track-ing a set of measured edge points from frame to frame (assuming that vehicle motion is known) and using a weighted least squares process to find the 4 parameters of the road model. A number of constraint and filtering processes representing knowledge of how a vehicle moves on a road have been applied.