Vision-Based Mobile Robot Navigation by Robust Path Line Tracking

Abstract

Line tracking is a well defined method of mobile robot navigation. It is simple in concept, technically easy to implement, and already employed in many industrial sites. Among several different line tracking methods, magnetic sensing is widely used in practice. In comparison, vision-based tracking is less popular due mainly to its sensitivity to surrounding conditions such as brightness and floor characteristics although vision is the most powerful robotic sensing capability. In this paper, a vision-based robust path line detection technique is proposed for the navigation of a mobile robot assuming uncontrollable surrounding conditions. The technique proposed has four processing steps; color space transformation, pixel-level line sensing, block-level line sensing, and robot navigation control. This technique effectively uses hue and saturation color values in the line sensing so to be insensitive to the brightness variation. Line finding in block-level makes not only the technique immune from the error of line pixel detection but also the robot control easy. The proposed technique was tested with a real mobile robot and proved its effectiveness.