Embedded vision system for mobile robot navigation

Abstract

We developed an embedded vision system that can accelerate the basic image processing functions for mobile robot navigation with compact hardware featuring low power consumption. The system is composed of a digital signal processor (DSP) and a dedicated LSI for low-level image processing, specifically for spatial filtering, feature extraction, and block matching operations. The image processing LSI has a dedicated systolic array processor consisting of 64 processing elements to accelerate basic block operations for image feature calculation and correlation-based image matching. The power consumption is only 10 W, about one-seventh that of a typical Pentium 4 personal computer, but the processing speed for correlation matching is roughly three times faster than such a system. With this vision system, we implemented a stereo-vision based navigation algorithm on our mobile service robot and performed a visual navigation experiment in a building hallway