Abstract

This paper presents an autonomous vision-based obstacle avoidance system. The system consists of three independent vision modules for obstacle detection, each of which is computationally simple and uses a di erent criterion for detection purposes. These criteria are based on brightness gradients, RGB Red, Green, Blue color, and HSV Hue, Saturation, Value color, respectively. Selection of which modules are used to command the robot proceeds exclusively from the outputs of the modules themselves. The system is implemented on a small monocular mobile robot and uses very low resolution images. It has been tested for over 200 hours in diverse environments. Keywords: Vision-based navigation, space exploration, modular design, reactive control, unstructured terrain.