A new approach to construct generalized local Voronoi diagrams via digital image processing

A robot navigating in an unknown environment depends on its sensors to obtain distance information of the obstacles with which it encounters. By using the collected distance information, a point robot is able to construct Generalized Local Voronoi Diagram (GLVD) of the area that is lying in vicinity of itself. In this paper, a method is proposed to build GLVDs via processing the digital images captured by a camera attached to a point robot which remains on a constant height platform. The robot under consideration collects several discrete images around itself. These images are processed by an algorithm which extracts the distance information of the three dimensional obstacles around the robot and constructs discrete images which are parts of the top view of the area. The resulting discrete images are then assembled to build a complete image of the top view of the region around the robot, at the center of which the robot is located. This local panoramic image is then used to construct the GLVD of the area under consideration. A case study is presented to demonstrate and verify the capabilities of the approach introduced. To the best of authors' knowledge, this is the first study which employs a camera attached to the robot itself and digital image processing to create Generalized Local Voronoi Diagrams.