Indoor testing with panning camera

Here's a video of a test run indoors. I've incorporated the pan-tilt unit into the vision system, so the camera now turns in the direction the robot is steering. This allows the vision system to image the road in the predicted direction without having to wait for the robot to roll forward and the chassis to turn. This takes a large amount of latency out of the guidance loop and improves performance, allowing the robot to move faster.



This is an example of cephalisation - placing sensors on a "head" whose orientation is not directly coupled with the main body, allowing the sensor suite to be directed independently from the body orientation.