On-line viewpoint and motion planning for efficient visual navigation under uncertainty

This paper proposes an on-line viewpoint planning method for a mobile robot to reach a goal position safely and quickly. When a robot passes through a narrow space, it moves slowly while carefully observing surrounding objects and estimating the distances to the objects precisely. On the other hand, the robot moves quickly in a widely open space. To realize such a behavior of the robot, by considering both the predicted positional uncertainty and the configuration of obstacles, the viewpoint is adaptively determined according to the narrowness of the nearby environment. The planner works on-line to cope with actual errors. The robot motion is continuously performed with speed control between the planned viewpoints during visual processing. An experimental result using a mobile robot with stereo vision shows the validity of the proposed method. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.