This paper presents an agile reactive navigation strategy for driving a
non-holonomic ground vehicle around a preset course of gates in a cluttered
environment using a low-cost processor array sensor. This enables machine
vision tasks to be performed directly upon the sensor's image plane, rather
than using a separate general-purpose computer. We demonstrate a small ground
vehicle running through or avoiding multiple gates at high speed using minimal
computational resources. To achieve this, target tracking algorithms are
developed for the Pixel Processing Array and captured images are then processed
directly on the vision sensor acquiring target information for controlling the
ground vehicle. The algorithm can run at up to 2000 fps outdoors and 200fps at
indoor illumination levels. Conducting image processing at the sensor level
avoids the bottleneck of image transfer encountered in conventional sensors.
The real-time performance of on-board image processing and robustness is
validated through experiments. Experimental results demonstrate that the
algorithm's ability to enable a ground vehicle to navigate at an average speed
of 2.20 m/s for passing through multiple gates and 3.88 m/s for a 'slalom' task
in an environment featuring significant visual clutter.Comment: 7 page