<title>Safe navigation for autonomous vehicles: a purposive and direct solution</title>

Abstract

It is a challenge to develop autonomous vehicles capable of operating in complicated, unpredictable, and hazardous environments. To navigate autonomous vehicles safely, obstacles such as protrusions, depressions, and steep terrains must be discriminated from terrain before any path planning and obstacle avoidance activity is undertaken. A purposive and direct solution to obstacle detection for safe navigation has been developed. The method finds obstacles in a 2-D image-based space, as opposed to a 3-D reconstructed space, using optical flow. The theory derives from new visual linear invariants based on optical flow. Employing the linear invariance property, obstacles can be directly detected by using a reference flow line obtained from measured optical flow. The main features of this approach are that (1) 2-D visual information (i.e., optical flow) is directly used to detect obstacles; no range, 3-D motion, or 3-D scene geometry is recovered; (2) the method finding protrusions and depressions is valid for the vehicle (or camera) undergoing general motion (both translation and rotation); (3) the error sources involved are reduced to a minimum, since the only information required is one component of optical flow. Experiments using both synthetic and real image data suggest that the approach is effective and robust. The method is demonstrated on both ground and air vehicles.