Development of a Reactive Mobile Robot Using Real Time Vision

In this paper, we discuss both theoretical and implementation issues of a vision based control approach applied to a mobile robot. After having brieey presented a visual servoing framework based on the task function approach, we point out some problems of its application to the case of mobile nonholonomic robots. We will show how using additional degrees of freedom provided by a manipulator arm, allows to overpass these diiculties by introducing redundancy with respect to the task. The second part of the paper deals with the development of an experimental testbed specially designed to rapidly implement and validate re-active vision based tasks. It is constituted by a mobile robot carrying a hand-eye system using a dedicated vision hardware based on VLSI's and DSP 96002's processors , which allows to perform image processing at video rate. Programming aspects are fully taken into account from tasks level speciication up to real time implementation by means of powerfull software tools handling explicitely reactivity and real time control issues.