Robotic Bees

This paper presents some experiments of a real-time navigation system driven by two cameras pointed laterally to the navigation direction (divergent stereo). The approach is based on the observation that the stereo set-up traditionally used in vision (i.e. with the optical axis pointing forward) may not be the best one for navigation, and particularly for continuous control of a mobile actor moving in unconstrained environment. Similarly to what has been proposed [5, 3], our approach [8, 10] is that for navigation purposes the driving information is not distance (as it is obtainable by a stereo set-up) but motion and, more precisely, by optical flow information computed over different areas of the visual field. Following this idea, a mobile vehicle has been equipped with a pair of cameras looking laterally (much like honeybees) and a controller based on fast, real-time computation of optical flow, has been implemented. The control of the mobile robot (ROBEE) is based upon the compariso..