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Biomimetic
centering behavior for mobile robots equipped with panoramic cameras |
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Brief description |
This work is an extension of previous work on
biologically inspired reactive robot navigation. The centering behavior
is achieved through perceptual information acquired though panoramic vision,
as opposed to a complex trinocular vision system. In its continuous attempt to build
intelligent artificial creatures, robotics has often been inspired by nature.
Particularly interesting is the remarkable variety of light-sensing
structures and information processing strategies occurring in animal visual
systems. The physiology of these systems appears to have been influenced,
through evolution, by the ecological niche and lifestyle of each animal
species. Insects such as bees, ants and flies have become a particularly
appealing source of inspiration, because of the remarkable navigational
capabilities they display, despite their relatively restricted neural system.
This, apparently, forced them to develop solutions to navigation tasks, which
are ingenious in their simplicity and robust in their implementation, both of
which are invaluable characteristics for robotic systems. The navigation task
examined in this work is the centering behavior, which consists in moving in
the middle of a corridor-like environment. Bees are able to accomplish
similar tasks by exploiting three features of their visuo-motor system: the
wide field of view of their eyes, their ability to estimate retinal motion
and a control mechanism which reorients their flight so that retinal motion
in the two eyes remains balanced. Inspired by this biological solution, we
attempt to create a reactive, vision-based centering behavior for a mobile
robot equipped with a panoramic camera providing a 360o visual field and a
sensor-based control law, where optical flow information from several
distinct “looking” directions in the entire field of view of the panoramic
camera is used directly in the control loop. No reconstruction of the robot’s
state is attempted; the information extracted from the sensory data is not
sufficient for this. It is however sufficient for the proposed control law to
accomplish the desired task. The use of a panoramic camera, as opposed to
that of a multi-camera setup or of a mechanism that reorients the gaze of a
typical perspective camera, simplifies the processing of the sensory
information and reduces the complexity of the required hardware. A detailed
theoretical analysis, followed by extensive experimentation, demonstrates the
effectiveness of this biologically-motivated approach. |
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Contributions |
Antonis
Argyros, Dimitris Tsakiris, Cedric Groyer. |
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Sample results |
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Example robot centering
behavior |
Another example of biomimetic
centering behavior. In this example, the translational velocity of the robot
is varying, as a consequence of the varying width of the corridor. |
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Centering in a right-angled
corridor (observers’ view) |
Centering in a right-angled
corridor (panoramic view) |
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Related publications
and documents |
·
A.A. Argyros, D.P. Tsakiris, C. Groyer “Bio-mimetic Centering Behavior for Robotic
Systems with Panoramic Sensors”, IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine,
Special Issue on Panoramic Robotics, pp. 21-30, December 2004. ·
A.A. Argyros, P. Georgiades,
P. Trahanias, D. Tsakiris “Semi-autonomous Navigation of a Robotic
Wheelchair”, Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems, Special Issue on
“Medical and Rehabilitation Robotics, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Vol. 34,
pp. 315–329, July 2002. ·
D. Tsakiris, A.A. Argyros,
“Corridor Following by Nonholonomic Mobile Robots Equipped with Panoramic
Cameras”, in proceedings of the IEEE Mediterranean Conference on Control and
Automation 2000 (MED’00), invited
session in “Sensor-based Control for Robotic Systems”, Patras, Greece, July
2000. The electronic versions of the above publications can be downloaded
from my publications
page. |
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Last update |
31 January 2005,
Antonis Argyros, argyros@ics.forth.gr |
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