RTSVC: Real‐time system for visual control of robots

This article presents an image processing system that can work in hard real‐time. Compared with systems that use the traditional multiprocessor architecture approach, this computer system takes advantage on recent technological advances and it is designed to work with a single processor PC under RTLinux. Its programming environment is similar to C programming language and it offers a friendly graphical user interface. The performance of the system is illustrated by means of experiments applied to visual guidance of mobile robots via velocity fields using a fixed high‐speed camera. The experiments were carried out with a strict sampling frequency of 100 Hz. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Imaging Syst Technol, 18, 251–256, 2008; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com).