Real-time road edge following for mobile robot navigation

Abstract

Research on autonomous vision-guided vehicles has received attention from several groups worldwide. This paper describes the ongoing research at the University of Bristol to explore mobile robot road-following algorithms and suitable hardware architectures to run these algorithms. The prototype hardware, designed and built at the University, is a real-time frame grabber system based on transputers. Two approaches to real-time road edge following that have been tested to guide a small tracked vehicle around the paths of the University gardens are described.