Architecture of the Vision System of a Line Following Mobile Robot Operating in Static Environment

Mobile robotics and computer vision two field of artificial intelligence and are important in areas like autonomous navigation and human computer interaction. In this paper, an extremely low cost solution for the vision system of a small mobile robot has been proposed. The robot navigates in its environment by following a pre-drawn track on floor. The vision system of commercial robots requires expensive dedicated hardware and complex algorithms. The proposed architecture of the vision system would require very cheap and available hardware resources like a webcam and a PC. A unique algorithm to extract track information from a sequence of images captured from the camera has been devised. The control system of the mobile robot would use the information provided by the vision system for its lateral control. Based on the proposed architecture and related algorithms, a software system has been developed that reflects the efficiency and effectiveness of the solution.