A trinocular vision system for a mobile robot

Abstract

Nowadays, autonomous vehicles are undergoing a distinct evolution, taking advantage of the recent technological progress in computer architectures. The development tools are more sophisticated, forwarding the trend to dedicated architectures. In the paper, the authors consider a parallel vision sub-system integrated in an overall architecture for a mobile robot (indoor autonomous vehicle). The system modules work in parallel, communicating through a hierarchical blackboard, an extension of the 'tuple space' from LINDA concepts, where they may exchange data or synchronization messages. The processing elements are of different skills, built around 50 MHz i860-XP Intel RISC processors for high level processing, and pipelined systolic array processors based on PLAs or FPGAs for low level image processing.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>