Safe navigation for autonomous vehicles: a purposive and direct solution

Gin-Shu Young; Tsai Hong Hong; Martin Herman; Jackson C. S. Yang

doi:10.1117/12.150227

6 August 1993 Safe navigation for autonomous vehicles: a purposive and direct solution

Gin-Shu Young, Tsai Hong Hong, Martin Herman, Jackson C. S. Yang

Proceedings Volume 2056, Intelligent Robots and Computer Vision XII: Active Vision and 3D Methods; (1993) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.150227
Event: Optical Tools for Manufacturing and Advanced Automation, 1993, Boston, MA, United States

Abstract

It is a challenge to develop autonomous vehicles capable of operating in complicated, unpredictable, and hazardous environments. To navigate autonomous vehicles safely, obstacles such as protrusions, depressions, and steep terrains must be discriminated from terrain before any path planning and obstacle avoidance activity is undertaken. A purposive and direct solution to obstacle detection for safe navigation has been developed. The method finds obstacles in a 2-D image-based space, as opposed to a 3-D reconstructed space, using optical flow. The theory derives from new visual linear invariants based on optical flow. Employing the linear invariance property, obstacles can be directly detected by using a reference flow line obtained from measured optical flow. The main features of this approach are that (1) 2-D visual information (i.e., optical flow) is directly used to detect obstacles; no range, 3-D motion, or 3-D scene geometry is recovered; (2) the method finding protrusions and depressions is valid for the vehicle (or camera) undergoing general motion (both translation and rotation); (3) the error sources involved are reduced to a minimum, since the only information required is one component of optical flow. Experiments using both synthetic and real image data suggest that the approach is effective and robust. The method is demonstrated on both ground and air vehicles.

Citation Download Citation

Gin-Shu Young, Tsai Hong Hong, Martin Herman, and Jackson C. S. Yang "Safe navigation for autonomous vehicles: a purposive and direct solution", Proc. SPIE 2056, Intelligent Robots and Computer Vision XII: Active Vision and 3D Methods, (6 August 1993); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.150227

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