A Strategy for the Fine Positioning of a Mobile Robot using Texture
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abstract
This paper presents a low-level visual strategy for positioning a mobile robot over short distances (6 feet) using the texture of an artificial landmark. The relative depth of the robot can be recovered from the number of texture generated edges detected in the landmark region. This technique can be extended to recover orientation as well as depth. In that application, the ratio of the number of edges per unit area in one side of the region to the other determines the orientation. The orientation taken with total number of edges determines the depth. The use of the number of edges per unit area as the metric enables this strategy to work well under variations in the shape and size of the region, including mild obscurations. Experiments show that depth can be recovered from an appropriate texture with an average error of 5.7% over a range of 73 to 10 inches. If the landmark is not perpendicular to the camera, the orientation can be recovered with an average error of 9.0 and depth with 8.0% over a range of 84 to 60 inches. Motivation and experiments are discussed, including the issues in designing an appropriate texture for an application. Results with our mobile robot using a motor control strategy similar to the controlled movement of the docking behavior are presented. 1990 SPIE.
