Tracked Mobile Robot Control System Design And Implementation

Mobile robot which is one of the most active areas of theoretical research and engineering practice, is a integrated system of environmental awareness, dynamic planning and decision-making, and behavior control, involving multi-disciplinary research of mechanical, sensors, electronics, automation, artificial intelligence, computer and etc. With a detailed study and development of a variety of related technologies, mobile robots have been out of the lab, widely used in military, industrial, service and other fields.In this paper, on the platform of a track-type mobile robot, a vision-based control system platform is built. A video monitoring and control system based on the WLAN network is developed, using embedded technology. And the algorithm of unstructured road detection applied to mobile robots is studied. The major work includes the followings:(1) The entire control system of distributed architecture is built based on CAN bus. The core of main control platform is the microprocessor s3c2410, expanding the interfaces of USB, Ethernet and CAN bus, which are connected to the camera, wireless AP, the sensor module and the motion control module. On the board of sensor data acquisition base on the MCU of MSP430, the circuit is designed for data acquisition of ultrasonic sensor, GPS and electronic compass, and CAN bus interface is extended to linked to the CAN bus for data communication. Motion control module with the core of TMS320F2812 can do the two closed-loop control of current and speed.(2) Using technology of the embedded Linux development, the platform of the software development of the ARM-Linux system is built, on which the driver for the camera, and the application of video capture based on Video4Linux, the algorithm of MPEG4 compression based on Xvidcore and the network conmmunication with the monitoring platform for video and control streaming based on socket is developed.(3) Based on the DirectShow development technology, the remote monitoring client is developed, which by the test with the robot is achieved the desired effect.(4) On the platform of the robot control system, with the analysis of various algorithm of the unstructured road detection, a basic real-time algorithm is carried out, which is suit for visual-navigation of mobile robots.