Stable AGV corridor navigation with fused vision-based control signals

Abstract

This work presents a control strategy for mobile robots navigating in corridors, using the fusion of the control signals from vision based controllers. To this aim two controllers are proposed to generate the control signals to be fused: one is based on the optical flow calculation and the other is based on the perspective lines in the corridor. Both controllers generate angular velocity commands to keep the robot navigating along the corridor, and compensate for the dynamics of the robot. The fusion of both control signals is made by using a Kalman filter. Stability of the resulting control system in analyzed. Experiments on a laboratory robot are presented to show the feasibility and performance of the proposed controller.