The aim of this work was to position a Mobile Robot in an Intelligent Space, and this paper presents a sensorial system for measuring differential phase-shifts in a sinusoidally modulated infrared signal transmitted from the robot. Differential distances were obtained from these phase-shifts, and the position of the robot was estimated by hyperbolic trilateration. Due to the extremely severe trade-off between SNR, angle (coverage) and real-time response, a very accurate design and device selection was required to achieve good precision with wide coverage and acceptable robot speed. An I/Q demodulator was used to measure phases with one-stage synchronous demodulation to DC. A complete set of results from real measurements, both for distance and position estimations, is provided to demonstrate the validity of the system proposed, comparing it with other similar indoor positioning systems.

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A system for real-time traffic sign detection is described in this paper. The vision-based traffic sign detection module developed in this work is intended for assisted driving of road vehicles by handling color images in RGB (Red, Green and Blue) format. In a first step a preattentive area of interest is determined based on the vertical projection of edge pixels. In a second step, a shape analysis is performed. In a third step, a color analysis is performed, and finally, a template is fitted. Some results obtained on a series of real road images are presented in order to illustrate the robustness of the detection system.