Low cost vision system for mobile robots with CMOS imagign array

摘要

This paper presents a low cost vision system based on a standard microcontroller and a propietary CMOS imaging array. This vision system has been developed for a mobile robot application but has enough flexibility to be incorporated in most of microcontroller based devices. The main advantage of this system is that image-processing algorithms can be programmed directly in the microcontroller, resulting on a compact low cost vision system with decision-making capabilities. The CMOS camera consists of a 128-128 pixels square array and circuitry for random access readout. The microcontroller uses the camera like a read only external memory. The systems has been tested successfully with some image processing algorithms useful in mobil erobot applications: object localisation and distnace estiamtion.