Real-time mobile robot navigation is possible with off-the-shelf hardware
David J. Michael, Michael Bolotski · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1992
We describe a real-time vision contest that took place in January 1992 at the MIT AI lab. The task was high speed visual navigation along a 60 foot winding indoor course. The computational power available was a conventional Sun Sparcstation 1 with a Sun color framegrabber. The imaging device was a standard color Pulnix CCD camera with an auto iris 4.8 mm lens. The robot base was a commercial B12 mobile robot from Real World Interface. The winning entry completed the course in 1:07 minutes about three times faster than a human controlling the robot using the same video input. Approximately ten person days of work was required to program an entry that would complete the course.