Hans P. Morevec, Stanford University This report describes ongoing research on a working system which drives a vehicle through cluttered environments under computer control, guided by images perceived through an onboard tv camera. The emphasis is on reliable and fast low level visual techniques which determine the existence and location of objects in the world, but do not identify them. Include...

OS4 (Omnidirectional Stationary Flying OUtstretched Robot) is an electrically powered four-rotor miniature helicopter developed towards fully autonomous operation in indoor/outdoor environments. The major goal of this research is the development and implementation of an active control system for a quadrotor helicopter. However, one has to consider seriously the design aspect in order to get rid...

The dorsal visual stream codes information crucial to the planning and online control of target-directed reaching movements in dynamic and cluttered environments. Two specific dorsally mediated abilities are the avoidance of obstacles and the online correction for changes in target location. The current study was designed to test whether or not both of these abilities can be performed concurren...

Vision is one of the most powerful and popular sensing method used for autonomous navigation. Compared with other on-board sensing techniques, vision based approaches to navigation continue to demand a lot of attention from the mobile robot research community. This is largely due to its ability to provide detailed information about the environment, which may not be available using combinations ...

A method is described for generating plan-like, reflexive, obstacle avoidance behaviour in a mobile robot. The experiments reported here use a simulated vehicle with a primitive range sensor. Avoidance behaviour is encoded as a set of continuous functions of the perceptual input space. These functions are stored using CMACs and trained by a variant of Barto and Sutton's adaptive critic algorith...

A reactive navigation system for an autonomous non-holonomic mobile robot in dynamic environments is presented. A new object detection algorithm and a new reactive collision avoidance method are presented. The sensory perception is based in a laser range finder (LRF) system. Simulation results are presented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed local navigational system in unknown environ...

where the subscript S refers to the secondary criterion. The overall solution is then given by substituting (3) into (2) to obtain that have been applied include joint range availability [19], singularity avoidance [26], [39], various measures of dexterity [5], [8], [11], [18], [31], [40], [41], and obstacle avoidance [23], [39]. The homogeneous solution can also be used to optimize secondary c...

Robots and Humans have to share the same environment more and more often. In the aim of steering robots in a safe and convenient manner among humans it is required to understand how humans interact with them. This work focuses on collision avoidance between a human and a robot during locomotion. Having in mind previous results on human obstacle avoidance, as well as the description of the main ...

In this paper, we develop an Intelligent Wheelchair (IW) system to provide safe mobility to the disabled or elderly people with cognitive and motor impairments. Our IW provides two main functions: obstacle avoidance and situation awareness. Firstly, it detects a variety of obstacles by a combination of a camera and 8 range sensors, and finds the viable paths to avoid the collisions of obstacles...

The Lane-Curvature Method (LCM) presented in this paper is a new local obstacle avoidance method for indoor mobile robots. The method combines the Curvature-Velocity Method (CVM) with a new directional method called the Lane Method. The lane method divides the environment into lanes, and then chooses the best lane to follow to optimize travel along a desired heading. A local heading is then cal...