Road image recognition is a key technique for vision navigation of outdoor mobile robot. Because vision navigation of outdoor mobile robot requires good robustness and rigid time limitation for real time autonomous driving

in order to satisfy the request of good robustness and rigid time limitation

in this paper

we applied successfully Augmented Transition Networks (ATN)

which is a kind of method used for sentence parsing in the artificial intelligence field

to the road image recognition of outdoor mobile robot

and proposed a road image interpretation algorithm based on the ATN. The characteristic of the ATN is

aiming at the different road condition

the algorithm can make up of different ATN

but all the ATN are constructed by the uniform construction rules. Therefore

the construction of the ATN is very flexible in application

and the essence of the ATN is coherent yet. The algorithm has good robustness and real time performance

and has been verified by the experiment that it can meet the needs for high speed autonomous vision navigation of outdoor mobile robot.