The Research Of Mobile Robot Vision Tracking Technique

With the developments of the mobile robot technology, the scope of applying mobile robots has been broadening. These mobile robots are supposed to complete the some complex missions inside and outside the room. In order to achieve such a goal, a mobile robot system with good stability and openness is demanded. Therefore, it is well worth developing the mobile robots which are used in service industry and prone to be upgraded by its users. In other words, these robots have great market potential and research value.This paper aims to design a mobile robot system basing on the analysis of the mechanical structure so as to attain the required standards for the mobile robots'structure and capability. The control centre of this system adopts an Industrial Personal Computer (IPC), an image grabbing card and a programmed multi-axes digital motion controller operating in MAXON series DC-servo system. And its hardware system, with characteristically good reliability and great precision, is also modularized, economical and practical. As for its hardware structure, researches have been done in the following aspects: the hardware configuration of the control system, hardware interface technique, and the design of the vision tracking system.In this mobile robot system Windows XP acts as the operation system plat for its software system. A series of methods, such as Multimedia Timer, Multithread, have been applied together. Several modules in this system, including the system management, interface, program compiling and vision tracking & control, all have been developed with the aid of Visual C++ 6.0 language. In practice, its software system has reached the standards of real-time and modularization capability, openness and a friendly interface as well as completing the multi-tasks.According to the characteristic operating environment for mobile robots and the color of the tracked subjects, the subjects are settled with the application of RGB mode and Chain Code Form.Meanwhile assuring the mutual relations among the World Coordinate,the Camera Coodinate,the Image Coordinate contributes to confirm the position of the tracked subjects as well as proposing the feasible tracking strategies.This mobile robot system functions well in the preliminary experiments.