This paper describes the biological motivation, design and testing of a novel obstacle sensor system based on the chemical sounding mechanism observed in slime molds. The sensor system emits a volatile sounding chemical and adjacent obstacles reduce the dispersion of the chemical. The resulting increase in chemical concentration is detected and interpreted as indicating an obstacle. To demonstr...

This paper concerns motion plannings on kinematic model of six-legged robot from two distinct aspect. The system is subjected to intermittent nonholonomic constraints making the robot model strati ed which requires additional considerations in motion planning. An improved version of strati ed control is compared in this paper with an approach exploiting di erential atness of a restricted subsys...

In this paper, we investigate the issue of accurate estimation of the three-dimensional (3D) coordinates of a static scene from real images, combining xation and stereo cues. We may need to compute 3D data in many applications: vehicle positioning and maneuver, object observation and recognition, moving or xed obstacle avoidance, 3D mapping for surveillance, etc. More speci cally, we discuss th...

A blind traveler walking through an unfamiliar environment, and a mobile robot navigating through a cluttered environment have an important feature in common: both have the kinematic ability to perform the motion, but are depended on a sensory system to detect and avoid obstacles. This paper describes the use of a mobile robot obstacle avoidance system as a guidance device for blind and visuall...

A method is presented for computation of obstacle boundaries in configuration space, with particular emphasis on time efficiency. Properties of configuration space transformations are presented in general, and these properties are invoked in algorithms that result in highly efficient computations. The approach depends on the definition of a set of primitives, which are themselves efficiently tr...

*1 Nagasaki Research & Development Center, Technology & Innovation Headquarters *2 Chief Staff Manager, Nagasaki Research & Development Center, Technology & Innovation Headquarters *3 Ship & Ocean Engineering Department, Shipbuilding & Ocean Development Division, Commercial Aviation & Transportation Systems *4 Submarine Department, Naval Ship Division, Integrated Defense & Space Systems Develop...

An autonomous mobile vehicle for indoor environment is described. The vehicle is based on three subsystems: a visual self-location module to determine vehicle location; an ultra-sonic based module for obstacle avoidance and a visual module to permit the vehicle to cross safety the doors. The prototypal vehicle is currently under test in our laboratory.

We present a novel method for automatically synthesizing road networks that are perceptually similar to given example road networks. Our algorithm can grow a new road network from an initial node or expand an existing network. For an unfinished node in the network, we search a set of candidate nodes in the example road networks that have similar node topology, and then find a best one by neighb...