Monocular image-based local collision-free path planning for autonomous robots

Monocular image-based local collision-free path planning for autonomous robots is presented in this paper. According to a pre-set pair of parallel lines, transformation equations from the image domain to the real world domain are easily defined. Moreover, the distances to obstacles in the robot's visual domain can be estimated. Our proposed method can not only easily identify obstacles and wall edges, but also estimate the distances and plan a collision-free path. Besides, this paper successfully integrates an image processing module with a local collision-free path planning, and also applies them to the collision-free and path planning of a mobile robot. For the proposed local collision-free path planning, the webcam can be located at two different situations: one is setting a webcam located on the ceiling and the other is setting a webcam on a mobile robot. In addition, the measurement method only uses a webcam and four laser projectors. Thus, we do not need to purchase expensive equipment to accomplish the desired results. From the experimental results, it shows that our proposed method can be effectively applied to the local collision-free path planning.