Abstract
Using a laser sheet beam projector combined with a CCD-Camera, an efficient technique to recognize complex surface of curvature and lane has been demonstrated for the purpose of mobile robot navigation. In general, obstacles of indoor environments in the field of SLIT-RAY plane are captured as segments of an elliptical arc and a line in the camera image. The robot has been capable of moving along around the obstacle in front of it, by recognizing the original shape of each segment with the differential coefficient by means of least squares method. In this technique, the imaged pixels of each segment, particularly elliptical arc, have been converted into a corresponding circular arc in the real-world coordinates so as to make more feasible the image processing for the position and radius measurement than conventional way based on direct elliptical are analyses. Advantages over direct elliptical cases include 1) higher measurement accuracy and shorter processing time because the circular arc process can reduce the shape-specifying parameters, 2) no complicated factor such as the tilt of elliptical arc axis in the image plane, which produces the capability to find column position and radiua regardless of the camera location . These are essentially required for a mobile robot application. This technique yields an accuracy less than 2cm for a 28.5cm radius column located in the range of 70-250cm distance from the robot. The accuracy obtained in this study is sufficient enough to navigate a cleaning robot which operates in indoor environments.
