POSITION LOCALIZATION FOR MOBILE ROBOTS USING A COLOR IMAGE OF EQUIPMENT AT NUCLEAR-PLANTS

Position localization is a necessary and important task for an intelli gent robot, which moves and works in place of human workers. Various m ethods for position localization tasks have been proposed and develope d by many researchers; for example, can active method using ultrasonic waves or laser and a passive method using images of bar codes or mark s in the workspace of the robot. The passive method, using images of t he object in the workspace of the robot, is particularly desirable, as this method does not influence the workspace. Thus, an arrangement of the workspace is not necessary and many robots can work simultaneousl y. This paper describes the development of a position localization pro gram for a mobile robot, using a colour image of an object in the nucl ear plant workspace. The developed program finds edges and vertices in nuclear plants as feature points for identifying the position of the mobile robot. Colour information is utilized effectively for detecting edges and extracting a necessary region.