Low-cost Autonomous Navigation System Based on Optical Flow Classification

Abstract: This work presents a low-cost robot, controlled by a Raspberry Pi, whose navigation system is based on vision. The strategy used consisted of identifying obstacles via optical flow pattern recognition. Its estimation was done using the Lucas-Kanade algorithm, which can be executed by the Raspberry Pi without harming its performance. Finally, an SVM-based classifier was used to identify patterns of this signal associated with obstacles movement. The developed system was evaluated considering its execution over an optical flow pattern dataset extracted from a real navigation environment. In the end, it was verified that the acquisition cost of the system was inferior to that presented by most of the cited works, while its performance was similar to theirs.