Dominant orientation tracking for path following

Abstract

The behaviour that allows mobile robots to follow what humans consider as paths is beneficial for autonomous navigation in a wide range of environments. Paths can be corridors, footpaths, catwalks, roads, etc. In fact roads can be considered as well-structured paths. Traditional approaches to path following has been extensions of road following systems. We present a vision-based path following method different to that of the traditional model fitting approach of road following. The method focuses on tracking the direction in which parallel lines in the environment are aligned. It is similar in principle to methods that extract vanishing points but with better robustness achieved with appropriate simplifying assumptions. Some preliminary results of successful path following experiments are also presented.