A Navigation And Control System Of Mobile Robot Designed For Path Following

The control system is an important part of mobile robot, and the navigation is one of the main functions of intelligent robot. The technology of path identification and tracking could be used for both mobile robot and unmanned vehicle. So it is widely used and concerned. A navigation system of path recognition and following was designed for the four-wheel mobile robot which was used in the Freescale Cup intelligent car contest. The main problem of detecting the path and navigation control based on multi-sensor information fusion was researched.First of all, the main parts of the mobile robot were introduced in this paper, and the paper accomplished the hardware of the control system. The whole system was consisted of several modules, including the core control module, the DC-motor driving module, the steering control module, the debugging module, the path recognition module, the speed detecting module and the power module. A digital camera and a group of photoelectric sensors formed the path recognition module.Secondly, the paper designed a control strategy about the path detecting and the navigation of the robot. The CMOS digital camera took a picture of the road in front of the robot. Then, an effective image processing algorithms was adopted to process the picture data from the camera and extract the useful road information. The road information collected by the vision sensor was abundant and in advance. The group of photoelectric sensors was used to overcome the disadvantage of the path vanishing when the robot moved to the complex path. Therefore, the paper proposed a method which fused the road information obtained by vision sensor and photoelectric sensors. The software was programmed to control the steering and speed of the robot which was based on PD algorithm and PID algorithm. The appropriate parameters of PID were achieved after a lot of experiments.Finally, the hardware and the software were debugged together. Lots of experiment verified the mobile robot could track the path fast and accurate.