Integration of an image hardware/software system into an autonomous robot

The major problem addressed by this research is how to integrate an image understanding subsystem into an autonomous mobile robot so that the robot will be self-contained and independent of any Unix workstation for extracting image information. The resulting image understanding subsystem should be a part of the total intelligent autonomous robot and should provide functionality that will allow the robot to determine its position and that of obstacles in a partially known environment. The image understanding subsystem should be fully integrated with existing motion control and sonar software. The approach taken was to develop software to capture images that uses a VME bus to interface with a standard image manager. The software was written to provide a clean interface between the image grabber hardware and the robots existing Model-based Mobile Robot Language. By maintaining functionality similar to that provided in previous image understanding software, the changes needed to incorporate previous research software is kept to a minimum. The result is a autonomous robot that can capture images using a standard image manager, display those images and then convert them to a format needed by existing image understanding software to extract information for position determination or avoid obstacles. The image understanding software uses only the computing power it has available on-board the robot. This gives the robot the capability to extract image information about its environment and remain autonomous and self- contained.