Design and construction of a line follower robot guided by pixels values of a camera connected to an FPGA

This work consists in the design and construction of a line follower robot controlled by a camera connected to a Cyclone IV FPGA in a development board DE0-NANO from the company TERASIC. The camera is a TDRB-D5M. Using computer vision algorithms programmed into the FPGA we are able to guide the robot through a line of one of three possible colors. We follow the line by the use of techniques for masking pixels in the cameras image. In addition, it is necessary to decompose and segment the image RGB pixel values to decide the line color that the camera is focusing. Based in the color detected, the robot controls the motors to keep up the course and advance at different speeds in the line. This project is a proof of concept for the use of the FPGA as a control device for robots. Furthermore, FPGAs are an alternative possible to microprocessor-based systems traditionally used. The results show that FPGAs are very promising as elements for robot control and for image processing applications. In this project, we use only 9.000 logic elements of the 22.000 available in the selected FPGA.