New Approach to Vision and Control for Road Following

摘要

The paper deals with a new quantitative, vision-based approach to road following.It is based on the theoretical framework of the recently developed optical flow-based visual field theory. By building on this theory, the authors suggest that motion commands can be generated directly from a visual feature, or cue, consisting of the projection into the image of the tangent point to the edge of the road, along with the optical flow of this point. Using this cue, they suggest several different vision-based control approaches. There are several advantages to using this visual cue: it is extracted directly from the image, i.e., there is no need to reconstruct the scene; for many road following situations this is the only necessary visual cue; only the horizontal component of the optical flow of the tangent point needs to be extracted; it has a scientific basis, i.e., the described techniques are not ad-hoc; and the related computations are relatively simple and thus suitable for real-time applications. For each control approach, they derive the value of the related steering commands.