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Summary: Reactive Robot Navigation Based on a Combination
of Central and Peripheral Vision
Abstract
In this paper, we present a new method for vision-based, reactive robot navigation that enables a
robot to move in the middle of the free space by exploiting both central and peripheral vision. The
system employs a forward-looking camera for central vision and two side-looking cameras for
sensing the periphery of the robot's visual field. The developed method combines the information
acquired by this trinocular vision system and produces low-level motor commands that keep the
robot in the middle of the free space. The approach follows the purposive vision paradigm in the
sense that vision is not studied in isolation but in the context of the behaviors that the system is
engaged as well as the environment and the motor capabilities of the robot. It is demonstrated that
by taking into account these issues, vision processing can be drastically simplified, still giving rise to
quite rich behaviors. The advantages of the method is that it does not make strict assumptions about
the environment, it requires very low level information to be extracted from the images, it produces
a robust robot behavior and it is computationally very efficient. Results obtained by both
simulations and from a prototype on-line implementation demonstrate the effectiveness of the
method.
1. Introduction
The term navigation refers to the capability of a system to move autonomously in its environment, by using its own
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