Colour Vision for Robot Navigation

. This paper presents two computer vision algorithms which address complementary aspects of the mobile robot navigation problem. The first is a beacon system which allows for reliable and accurate robot localization, the second is a novel simple, but highly effective, algorithm for colour based classification which is used for reactive control. Two reactive control algorithms are built using the classifier: obstacle avoidance and robot convoying. The classifier is able to learn models of navigable space completely automatically. Keywords: mobile robots, computer vision, colour, navigation 1 Introduction Robot navigation is still a challenging problem; in this paper we address the problems of localization ("where are we?") and real-time reactive control for both collision avoidance and robot convoying. Section 2 presents an advanced beacon system which allows robot positioning at ranges of up to 5m at slant angles of 10 ffi . Section 3 describes a novel (to our knowledge) and highly..