As part of a guidance system for mobile robots operating on a wide and flat floor, such as an ordinary factory or a gymnasium, we have proposed a special-purpose sign. It consists of a cylinder, with four slits, and a fluorescent light, which is placed on the axis of the cylinder. Two of the slits are parallel to each other, and the other two are angled. A robot obtains an image of the sign with a TV camera. After thresholding, we have four bright sets of pixels which correspond to the four slits of the cylinder. We compute by measuring the relative distances between the four points, the distance and the angle to the direction of the sign can be computed using simple geometrical equations. Using a personal computer with an image processing capability, we have investigated the accuracy of the proposed position identification method and compared the experimental results against the theoretical analysis of measured error. The data shows good coincidence between the analysis and the experiments. Finally, we have built a movable robot, which has three microprocessors and a TV camera, and performed several control experiments for trajectory following.
Image Processing on Personal Computer (5)., Basic Techniques (II)