Development of a visually guided mobile robot for environmental observation as an aid for outdoor crisis management operations

To solve these issues, an outdoor mobile robotic platform was equipped with a differential GPS system for accurate geo-registered positioning, and a stereo vision system. This stereo vision systems serves two purposes: 1) victim detection and 2) obstacle detection and avoidance. For semi-autonomous robot control and navigation, we rely on a behavior-based robot motion and path planner. In this paper, we present each of the three main aspects (victim detection, stereo-based obstacle detection and behavior-based navigation) of the general robot control architecture more in detail.