U-010

Path Planning for Mobile Robots Using a Video Camera Network

Authors: A. Hoover(1) and B. Olsen(2)
Affiliation: (1) Electrical and Computer Engineering Dept, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0407

(2) Dept of Medical Informatics and Image Analysis, Aalborg University, Denmark

Abstract
We describe a novel method to plan paths for mobile robots in an environment observed by a network of video cameras. The multiple video streams are fused to generate a spatial-temporal map of freespace. Updated at 5 Hz, this map concurrently locates both static and dynamic obstacles. Our novel method computes a polynomial-shaped path from current position to goal position for each map update (at 5 Hz), thus accomplishing both path planning and dynamic obstacle avoidance simultaneously. We demonstrate our methods operating in several dynamic scenarios, and compare our methods against paths planned using a numeric potential field.

Adam Hoover
ahoover@CLEMSON.EDU