Agile Reactive Navigation for A Non-Holonomic Mobile Robot Using A Pixel Processor Array
This addresses the problem of real-time navigation in cluttered environments for robotics by avoiding image transfer bottlenecks, though it is incremental as it applies an existing sensor type to a specific domain.
The paper tackled agile reactive navigation for a non-holonomic mobile robot using a pixel processor array to perform vision tasks directly on the sensor, achieving speeds up to 2000 fps outdoors and enabling the robot to navigate at average speeds of 2.20 m/s through gates and 3.88 m/s in a slalom task.
This paper presents an agile reactive navigation strategy for driving a non-holonomic ground vehicle around a preset course of gates in a cluttered environment using a low-cost processor array sensor. This enables machine vision tasks to be performed directly upon the sensor's image plane, rather than using a separate general-purpose computer. We demonstrate a small ground vehicle running through or avoiding multiple gates at high speed using minimal computational resources. To achieve this, target tracking algorithms are developed for the Pixel Processing Array and captured images are then processed directly on the vision sensor acquiring target information for controlling the ground vehicle. The algorithm can run at up to 2000 fps outdoors and 200fps at indoor illumination levels. Conducting image processing at the sensor level avoids the bottleneck of image transfer encountered in conventional sensors. The real-time performance of on-board image processing and robustness is validated through experiments. Experimental results demonstrate that the algorithm's ability to enable a ground vehicle to navigate at an average speed of 2.20 m/s for passing through multiple gates and 3.88 m/s for a 'slalom' task in an environment featuring significant visual clutter.