Vision-based two-phase strategy for autonomous lane navigation

A new practical autonomous lane navigation strategy for mobile robots, that called "vision-based two-phase strategy", is proposed. The proposed strategy consists of a two-phase navigation process. In the first phase, the mobile robot acquires a time-series of images and completes the image-processing iterations until it has sufficient confidence of success in generating the appropriate path. During image acquisition and calculation, the vehicle does not move. Subsequently, the mobile robot navigates based on the appropriate path provided by the processing in the first phase. The key strategy in controlling the mobile robot is the separation of off-line route scheduling and on-line navigation control given by the two phases. To confirm the proposed strategy, we implement a real autonomous electric wheelchair that can be guided by captured images. The validity of the proposed strategy is examined by actual experiments.