Navigation of Nonholonomic Mobile Robot Using Visual Potential Field

In this paper, we develop an algorithm for the navigation of a nonholonomic mobile robot using the visual potential. The robot is equipped with a camera system which dynamically captures the environment. The visual potential is computed from an image sequence and optical flow computed from successive images captured by the camera mounted on the robot. Our robot selects a local pathway using the visual potential computed from its vision system without any knowledge of a robot workspace. We present experimental results of the obstacle avoidance in the real environment