Obstacle Avoidance Method for Multi-Agent Robots Using IR Sensor and Image Information

Abstract

This paper presents obstacle avoidance method for scout robot or industrial robot in unknown environment by using IR sensor and vision system. In the proposed method, robots share the information where the obstacles are located in real-time, thus the robots can choose the best path for obstacle avoidance. Using IR sensor and vision system, multiple robots efficiently evade the obstacles by the proposed cooperation method. No landmark is used at wall or floor in experiment environment. The obstacles don't have specific color or shape. To get the information of the obstacle, vision system extracts the obstacle coordinate by using an image labeling method. The information obtained by IR sensor is about the obstacle range and the locomotion direction to decide the optimal path for avoiding obstacle. The experiment was conducted in <TEX>$7m{\times}7m$</TEX> indoor environment with two-wheeled mobile robots. It is shown that multiple robots efficiently move along the optimal path in cooperation with each other in the space where obstacles are located.