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Real-Time Obstacle Avoidance for Mobile Robots via Stereoscopic Vision Using Reconfigurable Hardware (Abstract Only)

Published: 22 February 2015 Publication History

Abstract

An embedded, real-time, and low power obstacle avoidance system is a critical component towards fully autonomous robots that can be used in safety missions, space exploration, and transportation systems among others. In this paper a complete prototyping platform for the evaluation of obstacle avoidance systems and autonomous robots is realized on reconfigurable hardware. An efficient stereo vision algorithm for producing the necessary 3D and an obstacle avoidance subsystem were both implemented on an ATLYS Spartan-6 FPGA board equipped with a VmodCam stereo camera module. A modified FDX Vantage 1/10 electric car platform was used for testing the proposed architecture in indoor and outdoor real-world scenes. The system receives stereo image data from the VmodCam module and a decision-making algorithm is applied on a specified Region of Interest (RoI) on the produced disparity map. The algorithm outputs the direction that the robot should move to in order to avoid any obstacles present. Experimental evaluation results indicate that the FPGA-based robotic platform can avoid obstacles in real-time (i.e. can process and identify obstacles within a 1/30th of a second that a stereo image takes to be processed) in both indoor and outdoor environments, with 91.7% accuracy, equivalent to software implementations. The overall power consumption of the proposed architecture, excluding the electronic car platform, is 6 W, making it ideal for use on mobile robots, without becoming a significant drain on its battery life.

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  • (2015)In-field vulnerability analysis of hardware-accelerated computer vision applications2015 25th International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL)10.1109/FPL.2015.7294003(1-4)Online publication date: Sep-2015
  • (2015)3D Imprinting of the Environment for the Visually Impaired2015 IEEE European Modelling Symposium (EMS)10.1109/EMS.2015.32(148-153)Online publication date: Oct-2015

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  1. Real-Time Obstacle Avoidance for Mobile Robots via Stereoscopic Vision Using Reconfigurable Hardware (Abstract Only)

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      FPGA '15: Proceedings of the 2015 ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays
      February 2015
      292 pages
      ISBN:9781450333153
      DOI:10.1145/2684746
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 22 February 2015

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      Author Tags

      1. fpga obstacle avoidance
      2. hardware based autonomous navigation
      3. stereoscopic vision

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      FPGA '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 20 of 102 submissions, 20%;
      Overall Acceptance Rate 125 of 627 submissions, 20%

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      Cited By

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      • (2015)In-field vulnerability analysis of hardware-accelerated computer vision applications2015 25th International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL)10.1109/FPL.2015.7294003(1-4)Online publication date: Sep-2015
      • (2015)3D Imprinting of the Environment for the Visually Impaired2015 IEEE European Modelling Symposium (EMS)10.1109/EMS.2015.32(148-153)Online publication date: Oct-2015

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