Development of Unmanned Autonomous Vehicle Control System Based on 1D Image Sensor 980611

An automatically guided vehicle by vision that recognizes the two white guidelines has been developed. The vehicle can run on a mildly bumpy grass course like as golf course up to 3 km/hour, staying in between two white lines with span of 3m to 3.6m avoiding obstacles within lanes. In this paper, the construction of the vehicle, the sensing strategy, the control algorithm, as well as practical aspects of the implementation are described. Employment of 1D image sensor which detects two white lanes yields the remarkable feature of the proposed system. The advantage of 1-D image sensor is the simplicity as well as significant reduction of the task for image processing in comparison with the conventional 2D-camera vision. Through the actual experiments at International Ground Robotics Competition '97, which held at Oakland University in June, we demonstrated the superior performance compared with conventional 2D vision type vehicles.