Mobile robot monocular vision navigation based on road region and boundary estimation

We present a monocular vision-based navigation system that incorporates two contrasting approaches: region segmentation that computes the road appearance, and road boundary detection that estimates the road shape. The former approach segments the image into multiple regions, then selects and tracks the most likely road appearance. On the other hand, the latter detects the vanishing point and road boundaries to estimate the shape of the road. Our algorithm operates in urban road settings and requires no training or camera calibration to maximize its adaptability to many environments. We tested our system in 1 indoor and 3 outdoor urban environments using our ground-based robot, Beobot 2.0, for real-time autonomous visual navigation. In 20 trial runs the robot was able to travel autonomously for 98.19% of the total route length of 316.60m.