Autonomous Obstacle Avoidance Scheme Using Monocular Vision Applied to Mobile Robots

Abstract

Abstract Mobile robots cannot move in an unknown environment with static or slow-moving obstacles effectively. We present an enhanced obstacle avoidance strategy using monocular vision to solve this problem. First, we combine Canny and Otsu to extract the barrier feature and find the critical pixel position of obstacles by the monocular vision. Then the image depth estimation algorithm is used to estimate the gaps. With these parameters of barriers, an improved bug algorithm is proposed to avoid the obstacles autonomously. The experiments show that the proposed obstacles avoidance strategy can effectively make a small mobile robot avoid different kinds of obstacles.