A fuzzy control system for visual guidance of an autonomous mobile robot

Describes a visual control scheme for outdoor navigation of an autonomous mobile robot. The involved control system includes the fuzzy approach at two levels. A fuzzy perception system which detects efficiently the road edges from the perception-domain image, and a fuzzy control system which uses the knowledge-base information and the scene model to control the robot motion. On the other hand, the fuzzy control system is finely tuned through feedback of mean square errors between the scene model parameters and the knowledge-base data. Hence, a road configuration from a preprocessed image is compared with a fuzzy template made from the fuzzy membership function based on the knowledge-base module. Finally, the fuzzy controller uses results of these calculations to home the robot on the planned path. The paper shows the principle of this system and the simulation results confirming the feasibility of the approach.