Real-Time Vision for Autonomous and Teleoperated Control of Unmanned Vehicles

This paper focuses on two related topics: a control system architecture that unifies autonomous and teleoperated control of unmanned vehicles, and examples of how real-time vision processing fits into this architecture. The NIST hierarchical real-time control system architecture and its application to unmanned vehicles is presented. The paper then discusses recent work at NIST in real-time vision for both teleoperated and autonomous vehicles. For teleoperated vehicles, we describe a system for video compression for low data rate remote vehicle driving. For autonomous vehicles, we describe passive range extraction from optical flow for applications such as target extraction and identification, vehicle driving, and terrain mapping. We also describe how each of these vision systems fits into the control system architecture.