A Simple Visual-Based System Applied to Safe Navigation of Vehicles

This manuscript addresses the problem of obstacle avoidance for semi- and autonomous terrestrial platforms in dynamic and unknown environments. Based on monocular vision, it proposes a set of tools that continuously monitors the way forward, proving appropriate road information in real time. Taking into account the temporal coherence between consecutive frames, a new Dynamic Power Management methodology is proposed and applied to a robotic visual machine perception, which included a new environment observer method to optimize energy consumption used by a visual machine. A remarkable characteristic of these methodologies is its independence of the image acquiring system and of the robot itself. This real-time perception system has been evaluated from different test-banks and also from real data obtained by two intelligent platforms. In semi-autonomous tasks, tests were conducted at speeds above 100 Km/h. Autonomous displacements were also carried out successfully.