On robot self-navigation in outdoor environments by color image processing

Abstract

Road-following by mobile robots under varying outdoor illumination demands special care to be taken on development of an algorithm, which should be flexible to color changes in sunny or shadow parts. The ill-structured weak-paved or dirt roads such as forest or mountain roads have no significant geometrical shape and are not planar. This paper describes a selective color-based road extraction method, in which appropriate color parameters are selected by one sample color of the road. We also report on experiments with mission of a small 4-wheel mobile robot equipped with a color camera sensor through a real natural field.