Narrow-aisle mobile robot navigation in hazardous environments

Routine monitoring of stored radioactive materials can be performed safely by mobile robots. In order to accomplish this in an environment consisting of aisles of drums, it is necessary to have a reliable means of aisle-following. This work describes the adaptation of successful road-following methods based on visual recognition of road boundaries to the waste storage problem. Since the effort is targeted for near-term usage in normal operating conditions, special emphasis has been given to the implementation of the visual processing on practical (i.e., small, low-cost, and low-power) hardware platforms. The system described here has been implemented onboard a robot in our laboratory.