Recognition of walkway area based on color image segmentation and autonomous mobile robot walkway following

This paper describes a method for a mobile robot walkway following behavior based on color image segmentation. The authors aim at accomplishing outdoor navigation in the campus walkway environment by mobile robot on which a normal Personal Computer is equipped for image processing and motion control. Although Thorpe et al. proposed a method for a road following based on color image segmentation, their approach is not suitable for such a PC computational power. The authors referred to this framework, and adapted and modified the Thorpe's approach to decrease the computational load, The authors implemented the adapted method onto a real mobile robot, and accomplished walkway following experiments under various daylight conditions.