Vision-based Unmanned Vehicle Research Articles

AN AUTONOMOUS GPS-DENIED UNMANNED VEHICLE PLATFORM BASED ON BINOCULAR VISION FOR PLANETARY EXPLORATION

Abstract. Vision-based navigation has become an attractive solution for autonomous navigation for planetary exploration. This paper presents our work of designing and building an autonomous vision-based GPS-denied unmanned vehicle and developing an ARFM (Adaptive Robust Feature Matching) based VO (Visual Odometry) software for its autonomous navigation. The hardware system is mainly composed of binocular stereo camera, a pan-and tilt, a master machine, a tracked chassis. And the ARFM-based VO software system contains four modules: camera calibration, ARFM-based 3D reconstruction, position and attitude calculation, BA (Bundle Adjustment) modules. Two VO experiments were carried out using both outdoor images from open dataset and indoor images captured by our vehicle, the results demonstrate that our vision-based unmanned vehicle is able to achieve autonomous localization and has the potential for future planetary exploration.

Generating Road Network Graph with Vision-Based Unmanned Vehicle

With the advancement of technology and its cheapness, robotic vehicles have gained a large number of applications. The spread of their use is growing also because they are getting smaller, lighter and easier to build. In this paper we present a simple and effective way to map a road network with the help of a driverless vehicle. Our approach consists of only three parts: vision-segmentation, angle variation and travelled distance. A video camera attached to a Lego^® NXT Mindstorm vehicle guides it by image segmentation using Matlab^® Image processing toolbox, along a road network, in which is represented by black tape over a white floor. The algorithm makes the vehicle travel all over the road memorizing main coordinates to identify all crossroads by keeping track of the travelled distance and the current angle. The crossroads and road’s end are the nodes of the graph. After several simulations have been performed, the modelling proved to be successful in that small scale approach. Consequently, there are good chances that driverless cars and UAVs also make use of the strategies to map route networks accordingly. The algorithm presented in this paper is useful when there is no localization signal such as GPS, for example, navigation on water, tunnels, inside buildings, among others. <strong>Faculty Sponsor</strong>: Francisco de Assis Zampirolli