<title>Three-dimensional line following using omnidirectional vision</title>

摘要

The purpose of this paper is to describe exploratory research on omnidirectional vision for the recognition and control of a mobile vehicle. The omnidirectional vision control technique described offers the advantage of an extremely wide angle field of view. This may be translated in practice to a machine which will not get lost when following a path, to a target locating system which can see both forward and backward, and generally helps the robot survive as a prey rather than as a predator. The wide angle of view permits a mobile robot to follow a curved path even around sharp corners, hairpin turns or other complicated curves. The disadvantage of the omnidirectional view is geometric distortion. This geometric distortion may be easily corrected after calibration to determine important parameters. An object recognition method was used that detects the largest target in a selected region of the field of view, and computes the centroid of this target. When two target points are detected, the algorithm calculates a projected three dimensional path for the robot. The distance and angle from this ideal path are then used to provide steering control for a mobile robot. The current application for this technique is a generic intelligent control device that is transportable from one mobile vehicle to another with changes only in system parameters rather than control architecture. The significance of this research is in showing how the geometric distortion can be compensated to permit an omnidirectional vision navigation control system for a mobile robot.