Image Processing for Next-Generation Robots

During the 21st century rapid progress in computer communication and technologies influences robot systems: becoming larger and more complicated than ever previously. To manage the rapidly growing sensor data the single robot systems transformed to networked systems, facing new challenges. The demand of low-cost mass production of robots (industrial or service type), the rising number of elderly people, who needs support of their everyday life, called forth of middleware technology in robot technologies (Brugali & Reggiani, 2005). The middleware technologies provide the heterogenic environment that hides low level functions (hardware specific implementations) and provides the required flexibility for robot system developers. In the beginning of the middleware developments it was doubtful, that the technology causes retardation in speed, but after benchmarks of Christopher D. Gill and William D. Smart (Gill & Smart, 2002) it showed that it has more advantages then disadvantages. They strongly believe that Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA)–based middleware offers great advantages in robotics and embedded sensor applications. The urgent need of middleware forced the robot programmers create their own middleware’s that meets best their need. Unfortunately, most of the pioneering initiatives are developed independently of the others, driven by specific applications and objectives (Kotoku & Mizukawa, 2006). In conventional robot system development, the different robot parts (sensors, processing elements and actuators) are combined together in a compact, self contained system. Both type of robot system (industrial or service type) faces challenges in the sense of flexibility, reusability and new part integration. In case of industrial robots, the end-user has very limited intervention to the control system itself (Brogårdh, 2007) and in case of the service robots, the human – robot co-existence demands an extreme flexibility to care take all of human ever changing needs. Robot systems usually consist of sensors that provide information about the environment, computational units that process information about the environment and actuators that are controlled according to the decisions made by the computational units. In recent robot systems one of the most important sensors are image sensors that provide visual information about the environment. Effective robot system design requires that image sensors and image processing functionalities can as easily be integrated with robot systems as any other component. The vision related components of a robot system should thus be integrated using the same middleware as the robot system O pe n A cc es s D at ab as e w w w .ite ch on lin e. co m