Vision-Based Autonomous Robot Navigation

Abstract

In the last three decades, there has been a rapid increase in the development of vision-based autonomous robots due to the advancement in computer technology. The ability to achieve real-time image processing was once considered as a pipe-dream is now made possible. However, the challenge still remains in the area of extracting relevant navigational data from 2-D image representations of the 3-D external environments that are robust against image distortions, occlusions and environmental conditions. Despite the challenge, autonomous robots today have found their way into our everyday life through commercially available robots such as autonomous vacuum cleaner robots, lawn mower robots, pool cleaner robots, robots toys [1] and prominently planetary exploration robots such as a robots series in the Mars Pathfinder project [2, 3]. These prominent examples of successful commercial and exploration robots are the results of thousands of researcher’s contributions worldwide.