Vision-based direction determination of a mobile robot in indoor environment

Abstract

In this paper, a vision based direction determination of a mobile robot in indoor environment is defined to detect the robot direction normal to the surrounding wall in indoor environment. For this purpose, we propose the direction determination algorithm using the Hough transformation and horizontal line search with vision information. Our proposal shows that this scheme can be used in any indoor environment where there are horizontal line structures (corner, any notice on the wall). In order to verify the proposed algorithm, we perform the experiments by the mobile robot utilizing a webcam as a vision sensor. The experimental results show that this method is verified for navigation of a mobile robot in indoor environment since its longitudinal pathway direction can be determined automatically.