Lightweight Vision -or- How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Camera

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I believe that it is practical to build very simple and reliable vision systems to perform a variety of tasks. Over the past five years I have developed a number of simple vision systems for piloting mobile robots in real time by taking advantage of the structure of robot’s task and environment. The most recent of the systems, the Polly system (see Horswill [5][6]), gives simple tours in an unmodified office environment using real-time vision processing performed by an inexpensive on-board computer. The robot was build for less than $20K.