A Hybrid Architecture for Vision-Based Obstacle Avoidance

Abstract EN

This paper proposes a new obstacle avoidance method using a single monocular vision camera as the only sensor which is called as Hybrid Architecture.

This architecture integrates a high performance appearance-based obstacle detection method into an optical flow-based navigation system.

The hybrid architecture was designed and implemented to run both methods simultaneously and is able to combine the results of each method using a novel arbitration mechanism.

The proposed strategy successfully fused two different vision-based obstacle avoidance methods using this arbitration mechanism in order to permit a safer obstacle avoidance system.

Accordingly, to establish the adequacy of the design of the obstacle avoidance system, a series of experiments were conducted.

The results demonstrate the characteristics of the proposed architecture, and the results prove that its performance is somewhat better than the conventional optical flow-based architecture.

Especially, the robot employing Hybrid Architecture avoids lateral obstacles in a more smooth and robust manner than when using the conventional optical flow-based technique.