Patent ID: 8548665

Claim:
A movable body system comprising: an image pickup apparatus configured to capture an image of an external environment; a movable body to which the image pickup apparatus is attached, the movable body including a driving wheel and being provided to travel along a predetermined travel path, the image pickup apparatus being configured to capture the image of the external environment so that an image-capturing direction of the image pickup apparatus is changed in accordance with a direction of the driving wheel; an image analyzer that performs image matching between the image captured by the image pickup apparatus and an image, which is previously captured on the travel path of the movable body; a wall-surface detector configured to detect that an object is a wall surface if a shape of the object that reflects laser light emitted from the movable body has a straight portion with a length equal to or larger than a predetermined length in plan view, the wall-surface detector being configured to detect a direction of the movable body with respect to a wall surface, which is arranged along the travel path, and a distance between the wall surface and the movable body; and a traveling-direction calculator that detects a shift of the movable body with respect to the travel path from an output of the image analyzer or the wall-surface detector, and calculates a traveling direction to cause the movable body to travel on the travel path, the traveling-direction calculator being configured to change a source for calculating the traveling direction from the image analyzer to the wall-surface detector if the traveling-direction calculator receives, from the image analyzer, a signal that indicates that the image captured by the image pickup apparatus does not match the image previously captured on the travel path of the movable body.