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Low computation vision-based navigation for mobile robots

In the design and construction of mobile robots vision has always been one of the most potentially useful sensory systems. In practice however, it has also become the most difficult to successfully implement. I have designed a small, light, cheap, and low power Mobot Vision System that can be used to guide a mobile robot in a constrained environment. The target environment is the surface of Mars, although I believe the system should be applicable to other conditions as well. It is my belief that the constraints of the Martian environment will allow the implementation of a system that provides vision based guidance to a small mobile rover. The purpose of this vision system is to process realtime visual input and provide as output information about the relative location of safe and unsafe areas for the robot to go. It could also be programmed to do additional tasks such as tracking a small number of interesting features, for example the lander or large rocks (for scientific sampling). The system I have built was designed to be self contained. It has its own camera and on board processing unit. It draws a small amount of power and exchanges a very small amount of information with the host robot. The project had two parts, first the construction of a hardware platform, and second the implementation of a successful vision algorithm. For the first part of the project I built a small self contained vision system. It employs a cheap but fast general purpose microcontroller (a 68332) connected to a Charge Coupled Device (CCD). The CCD provides the CPU with a continuous series of medium resolution gray-scale images (64 by 48 pixels with 256 gray levels at 10-30 frames a second). In order to accommodate my goals of low power, light weight, and small size I bypassed the traditional NTSC video and used a purely digital solution. As the frames are captured any desired algorithm can then be implemented on the microcontroller to extract the desired information from the images and communicate it to the host robot. Additionally, conventional optics are typically oversized for this application so I have employed aspheric lenses, pinhole lenses, and lens sets. It is my hypothesis that a simple vision algorithm does not require huge amounts of computation and that goals such as constructing a complete three dimensional map of the environment are difficult, wasteful, and possibly unreachable. …