Autonomous navigation in ill-structured outdoor environment

Abstract

Presents a methodology for autonomous navigation in weakly structured outdoor environments such as dirt roads or mountain ways. The main problem to solve is the detection of an ill-defined structure-the way-and the obstacles in the scene, when working in variable lighting conditions. First, we discuss the road description requirements to perform autonomous navigation in this kind of environment and propose a simple sensors configuration based on vision. A simplified road description is generated from the analysis of a sequence of color images, considering the constraints imposed by the model of ill-structured roads. This environment description is done in three steps: region segmentation, obstacle detection and coherence evaluation.