Abstract: To solve the problems of excessive consumption of computing resource,poor real-time performance and limited detection range of current mobile robot vision system,a fast and efficient obstacle detection method was proposed in this paper based on active omnidirectional vision sensor (AODVS).AODVS integrates ODVS with single view point and a planar laser generator composed by four red liner laser that installed on the same plane.All obstacles around the mobile robot can be detected in real time by AODVS.According to laser information on the surrounding obstacles projected by planar laser generator,the obstacles distance and direction information are obtained with robot vision method.Then,based on this information,the direction of movement and speed of the mobile robot are controlled adopting omnidirectional mobile robot obstacle avoidance algorithm.The experiment results show that the obstacle detection method based on AODVS can achieve the goals of avoiding the obstacles quickly and accurately and reducing the requirement of computing resource for the mobile robot.

Key words: Active omnidirectional vision sensor(AODVS),Laser extraction,Obstacle detection,Omnidirectional obstacle avoiding strategy