Design and Development of a Small Stereovision Sensor Module for Small Self-Contained Autonomous Robots

We designed a small stereovision (SSV) sensor module for easily adding visual functions to a small robot and enabling their use. The SSV sensor module concept includes 1) a vision sensor module containing a camera and a visual processor and 2) connecting to a robot system through general-purpose interface. This design enables the use of visual functions as ordinary sensors such, as touch or ultra-sonic sensors, by simply connecting a general-purpose interface port such as an IO port or serial connector. We developed a prototype module with small CMOS image sensors for a mobile phone and a 16 bit microprocessor. The 30×40mm prototype is small enough to attach even to palm-top robots. Our module demonstrates image processing including binarization, color extraction and labeling, and template matching. We developed self-contained robots, including a 2DOF head robot, a humanoid robot, and a palm-top robot, and realized vision-based autonomous behavior.