Concurrent Algorithms for a Mobile Robot Vision System

摘要

The application of computer vision to mobile robots has generally been hampered by insufficient on-board computing power. The advent of VLSI-based general purpose concurrent multiprocessor systems promises to give mobile robots an increasing amount of on-board computing capability, and to allow computation intensive data analysis to be performed without high-bandwidth communication with a remote system. This paper describes the integration of robot vision algorithms on a 3-dimensional hypercube system on-board a mobile robot developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The vision system is interfaced to navigation and robot control software, enabling the robot to maneuver in a laboratory environment, to find a known object of interest and to recognize the object's status based on visual sensing. We first present the robot system architecture and the principles followed in the vision system implementation. We then provide some benchmark timings for low-level image processing routines, describe a concurrent algorithm with load balancing for the Hough transform, a new algorithm for binary component labeling, and an algorithm for the concurrent extraction of region features from labeled images. This system analyzes a scene in less than 5 seconds and has proven to be a valuable experimental tool for research in mobile autonomous robots. 9 refs., 1 fig., 3 tabs. (ERA citation 13:022252)