A Robust Surveillance System for AGV Using Forward-Downward Visual Measurements

Automatic Guided Vehicle (AGV) has been widely used in the warehouse for transporting the bulky and heavy cargos. However, the AGV may deviate the regular trajectories in presence of incorrect or untimely commands sent form the server due to, e.g., cyber attacks, unexpected blocks of the wireless signals. In order to ensure AGV running safely, this paper presents a visual surveillance system by making full use of the measurements from the forward and downward cameras. Specifically, the forward camera estimates the AGV positions and attitudes by tracking the surrounding landmarks detected from the forward image sequences. Besides, the downward camera is used to detect the QR codes fixed on the floor and estimate the AGV poses in the absolute reference frame. Apart from that, the AGV poses from the downward camera could correct scale and poses estimated the forward view. The proposed method has been extensively performed on the developed platform. The results proves the effectiveness in using the complementary forward-downward visual measurements for AGV security surveillance.