Distributed Vision System: A Perceptual Information Infrastructure for Robot Navigation

This paper proposes a Distributed Vision System as a Perceptual Information Infrastructure for robot navigation in a dynamically changing world. The distributed vision system, consisting of vision agents connected with a computer network, monitors the environment, maintains the environment models, and actively provides various information for the robots by organizing communication between the vision agents. In addition to conceptual discussions and fundamental issues, this paper provides a prototype of the distributed vision system for navigating mobile robots.