This paper describes a method of road tracking by using a vision and laser with extracting road boundary (road lane and curb) for navigation of intelligent transport robot in structured road environments. Road boundary information plays a major role in developing such intelligent robot. For global navigation, we use a global positioning system achieved by means of a global planner and local navigation accomplished with recognizing road lane and curb which is road boundary on the road and estimating the location of lane and curb from the current robot with EKF(Extended Kalman Filter) algorithm in the road assumed that it has prior information. The complete system has been tested on the electronic vehicles which is equipped with cameras, lasers, GPS. Experimental results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the combined laser and vision system by our approach for detecting the curb of road and lane boundary detection.
The paper proposes a human-following behavior of mobile robot and an intelligent space (ISpace) is used in order to achieve these goals. An ISpace is a 3-D environment in which many sensors and intelligent devices are distributed. Mobile robots exist in this space as physical agents providing humans with services. A mobile robot is controlled to follow a walking human using distributed intelligent sensors as stably and precisely as possible. The moving objects is assumed to be a point-object and projected onto an image plane to form a geometrical constraint equation that provides position data of the object based on the kinematics of the intelligent space. Uncertainties in the position estimation caused by the point-object assumption are compensated using the Kalman filter. To generate the shortest time trajectory to follow the walking human, the linear and angular velocities are estimated and utilized. The computer simulation and experimental results of estimating and following of the walking human with the mobile robot are presented.